Why Quit Now! Is There Anything “Positive†About Smoking?
I have one question for you and the question that you need to answer to yourself is: Do you want good health for a couple of years or for a lifetime? If I were to answer this question then I would want good health for a lifetime. Consequently, I must follow through with actions and make good lifestyle choices so I am able to maintain good health for life. Moreover, since you know that smoking is so detrimental to health wouldn't you want to learn the best way to stop smoking today instead of tomorrow?
Tobacco hazards are so many and at least one or more deadly conditions may target you sooner rather than later. Some of the deadly tobacco consequences are chronic artery disease, heart disease, COPD (chronic lung disease), heart attack, strokes, cancer to a variety of organs (including lungs and throat), premature skin aging and wrinkles, internal organ aging as much as 15 years more than your biological age and the list goes on and on.
Is there anything €positive€ about smoking one might wonder? Phillip Morris the makers of the cigarette brand Marlboro thought so few years back. Sometimes around the mid 2000s the Phillip Morris tobacco company released a statement in the media and labeled it as a €positive€ outcome of smoking. The €positive€ news media piece goes on to state that during that year the country of the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe met their Health Care budget and actually for the first time in their history their budget was in positive surplus and they attributed this €positive€ event to smoking.
The media then went on to investigate this news worthy event and decided to get to the bottom of this story and what they found was pretty disturbing. They found out that people in Czech Republic are amongst the heaviest smokers worldwide and were dying in large numbers in the prime of their lives while they were in their fifties or sixties before retirement age and before they were able to collect their pensions as direct consequences of the smoking hazards. Consequently, their government had fewer people to pay for healthcare related expenses and pension plans and went on to have a surplus. The US media, government and political institutions went into an uproar and demanded Phillip Morris to withdraw their €positive€ statement and apologize in public for their ill intentions and they did.
There is nothing positive about smoking and the time to know the stop smoking benefits is NOW. Don't wait like Stephanie did whose story I reveal below in an excerpt from Action Step 1 in my book titled €Lifestyle Makeover for All Tobacco Users€.
Action Step 1
Make the Decision to Quit
And make it now. Don't wait or put it off any longer because your life is in very serious danger.
€What's the hurry? I'll quit later, when I'm older. Problems happen later on in life€¦!€ Or do they?!!!
The Story of Stephanie, a 44-Year-Old Waitress, Who Is Breathing with the Help of an Oxygen Tank Strapped to Her Back
I took an assignment once to work at a retail pharmacy in West Texas during a winter week in 2006. I checked into my hotel the eve before the work assignment started. After I got situated in my room, I headed down to the restaurant located in the hotel lobby. I was surprised to see a good-looking blue-eyed lady approach my table and introduce herself as my waitress, Stephanie, telling me she'd be glad to take my order whenever I was ready.
Stephanie was courteous and had a polite smile, but by no means was her smile joyous. What was striking about Stephanie was that two clear plastic tubes ran from her nose, down both sides of her face, extending to the back of her neck and feeding into an oxygen tank that was strapped onto her back. Stephanie was taking frequent, short and shallow breaths and, in fact, had to catch a breath as she was introducing herself to me and offering to take my order.
For a while, I played the indifferent, the usual customer who was busy trying to select a meal from the menu and who did not notice these extra accessories. But deep inside, I was burning with empathy and the desire to know more about her condition. Stephanie was of normal weight, her facial skin was somewhat wrinkled, and her face had a dark blue shade to it, common to those who suffer oxygen-deprivation; she could not have been more than 47 or 48 years old, I thought. This is a typical appearance that sufferers of a lung disease called emphysema display.
Emphysema is a disease that is mainly caused by smoking and occurs more commonly in female smokers. It basically causes the slow but irreversible destruction of the tiny air sacks of the lungs (technically referred to as alveoles) through which oxygen (which is life to every cell in our body) that we breathe from the air gets delivered to the blood. As the most essential and elemental substance of life, oxygen reaches the blood via the lungs then through a web of blood vessels that surround and connect to the lungs, and then gets delivered to every organ and cell of the body starting with the heart, brain and then to the rest of the body.
As these air sacks die slowly but surely as a result of emphysema, the capacity of the lungs to deliver oxygen-rich blood to our vital organs diminishes gradually, consequently starving our cells of oxygen. That's the reason for the dark bluish skin color of emphysema sufferers. So, I suspected that emphysema is what Stephanie had.
A few minutes after I'd placed my order, Stephanie returned back with my dinner plate and placed it at the table in front of me, saying, €I hope you enjoy it.€ As she was about to turn away, I thanked her and asked her, €If you don't mind me asking, Stephanie, I am a pharmacist and wondering about the kind of breathing problem you might have.€ She tried to take a deep breath; it took a couple seconds for her to gather her thoughts and answer, as if she wished she could have told me a different happier story than the one she was about to tell.
Then she said, €Emphysema. I have a lung disease called emphysema.€ I asked, €Were you a smoker?€ Then she opened up and started telling me her heartbreaking story. With a regretful tone she replied, €Yes, unfortunately, I was. I started smoking ever since I was 15 or 16, and I'd been smoking, on average, about a pack a day since then until my diagnosis with emphysema. Everybody in my family smoked, and they all quit. I had set a goal for myself to quit by the age of 45 because I knew that smoking was and is bad for me, but I thought smokers didn't encounter problems till later in life; quitting at 45 seemed a reasonable enough time for me to quit. I guess I was wrong. I am now 44, and I was diagnosed with emphysema a couple of years ago.
I quit smoking then, but I guess it was too late because the doctor told me that emphysema is irreversible and will not go away, and that I am going to have to live with it. The doctor also started me on all kinds of inhalers; and, lately, my lungs have been deteriorating, so I had to be put on oxygen, and that is what you see strapped on my back. The doctor also told me that my heart has weakened (when someone has a lung disease such as emphysema the heart has to make an extra effort in order to overcompensate for the reduced amount of oxygen that gets through to the internal organs and the whole body. Consequently, the heart gets overworked and weakens over time.) So my doctor put me on heart medications as well.€
I tried to comfort her and told her I was familiar with the inhalers the doctor put her on, as some inhalers work on helping one breathe better by opening up the airways in the lungs and receive oxygen more easily, and other steroid-type inhalers work longer-term and help in reducing the inflammation. I explained that the disease progression and severity may be slowed and she could be kept comfortable with the addition of oxygen.
She vowed to do her best to remain as healthy as possi
Tobacco hazards are so many and at least one or more deadly conditions may target you sooner rather than later. Some of the deadly tobacco consequences are chronic artery disease, heart disease, COPD (chronic lung disease), heart attack, strokes, cancer to a variety of organs (including lungs and throat), premature skin aging and wrinkles, internal organ aging as much as 15 years more than your biological age and the list goes on and on.
Is there anything €positive€ about smoking one might wonder? Phillip Morris the makers of the cigarette brand Marlboro thought so few years back. Sometimes around the mid 2000s the Phillip Morris tobacco company released a statement in the media and labeled it as a €positive€ outcome of smoking. The €positive€ news media piece goes on to state that during that year the country of the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe met their Health Care budget and actually for the first time in their history their budget was in positive surplus and they attributed this €positive€ event to smoking.
The media then went on to investigate this news worthy event and decided to get to the bottom of this story and what they found was pretty disturbing. They found out that people in Czech Republic are amongst the heaviest smokers worldwide and were dying in large numbers in the prime of their lives while they were in their fifties or sixties before retirement age and before they were able to collect their pensions as direct consequences of the smoking hazards. Consequently, their government had fewer people to pay for healthcare related expenses and pension plans and went on to have a surplus. The US media, government and political institutions went into an uproar and demanded Phillip Morris to withdraw their €positive€ statement and apologize in public for their ill intentions and they did.
There is nothing positive about smoking and the time to know the stop smoking benefits is NOW. Don't wait like Stephanie did whose story I reveal below in an excerpt from Action Step 1 in my book titled €Lifestyle Makeover for All Tobacco Users€.
Action Step 1
Make the Decision to Quit
And make it now. Don't wait or put it off any longer because your life is in very serious danger.
€What's the hurry? I'll quit later, when I'm older. Problems happen later on in life€¦!€ Or do they?!!!
The Story of Stephanie, a 44-Year-Old Waitress, Who Is Breathing with the Help of an Oxygen Tank Strapped to Her Back
I took an assignment once to work at a retail pharmacy in West Texas during a winter week in 2006. I checked into my hotel the eve before the work assignment started. After I got situated in my room, I headed down to the restaurant located in the hotel lobby. I was surprised to see a good-looking blue-eyed lady approach my table and introduce herself as my waitress, Stephanie, telling me she'd be glad to take my order whenever I was ready.
Stephanie was courteous and had a polite smile, but by no means was her smile joyous. What was striking about Stephanie was that two clear plastic tubes ran from her nose, down both sides of her face, extending to the back of her neck and feeding into an oxygen tank that was strapped onto her back. Stephanie was taking frequent, short and shallow breaths and, in fact, had to catch a breath as she was introducing herself to me and offering to take my order.
For a while, I played the indifferent, the usual customer who was busy trying to select a meal from the menu and who did not notice these extra accessories. But deep inside, I was burning with empathy and the desire to know more about her condition. Stephanie was of normal weight, her facial skin was somewhat wrinkled, and her face had a dark blue shade to it, common to those who suffer oxygen-deprivation; she could not have been more than 47 or 48 years old, I thought. This is a typical appearance that sufferers of a lung disease called emphysema display.
Emphysema is a disease that is mainly caused by smoking and occurs more commonly in female smokers. It basically causes the slow but irreversible destruction of the tiny air sacks of the lungs (technically referred to as alveoles) through which oxygen (which is life to every cell in our body) that we breathe from the air gets delivered to the blood. As the most essential and elemental substance of life, oxygen reaches the blood via the lungs then through a web of blood vessels that surround and connect to the lungs, and then gets delivered to every organ and cell of the body starting with the heart, brain and then to the rest of the body.
As these air sacks die slowly but surely as a result of emphysema, the capacity of the lungs to deliver oxygen-rich blood to our vital organs diminishes gradually, consequently starving our cells of oxygen. That's the reason for the dark bluish skin color of emphysema sufferers. So, I suspected that emphysema is what Stephanie had.
A few minutes after I'd placed my order, Stephanie returned back with my dinner plate and placed it at the table in front of me, saying, €I hope you enjoy it.€ As she was about to turn away, I thanked her and asked her, €If you don't mind me asking, Stephanie, I am a pharmacist and wondering about the kind of breathing problem you might have.€ She tried to take a deep breath; it took a couple seconds for her to gather her thoughts and answer, as if she wished she could have told me a different happier story than the one she was about to tell.
Then she said, €Emphysema. I have a lung disease called emphysema.€ I asked, €Were you a smoker?€ Then she opened up and started telling me her heartbreaking story. With a regretful tone she replied, €Yes, unfortunately, I was. I started smoking ever since I was 15 or 16, and I'd been smoking, on average, about a pack a day since then until my diagnosis with emphysema. Everybody in my family smoked, and they all quit. I had set a goal for myself to quit by the age of 45 because I knew that smoking was and is bad for me, but I thought smokers didn't encounter problems till later in life; quitting at 45 seemed a reasonable enough time for me to quit. I guess I was wrong. I am now 44, and I was diagnosed with emphysema a couple of years ago.
I quit smoking then, but I guess it was too late because the doctor told me that emphysema is irreversible and will not go away, and that I am going to have to live with it. The doctor also started me on all kinds of inhalers; and, lately, my lungs have been deteriorating, so I had to be put on oxygen, and that is what you see strapped on my back. The doctor also told me that my heart has weakened (when someone has a lung disease such as emphysema the heart has to make an extra effort in order to overcompensate for the reduced amount of oxygen that gets through to the internal organs and the whole body. Consequently, the heart gets overworked and weakens over time.) So my doctor put me on heart medications as well.€
I tried to comfort her and told her I was familiar with the inhalers the doctor put her on, as some inhalers work on helping one breathe better by opening up the airways in the lungs and receive oxygen more easily, and other steroid-type inhalers work longer-term and help in reducing the inflammation. I explained that the disease progression and severity may be slowed and she could be kept comfortable with the addition of oxygen.
She vowed to do her best to remain as healthy as possi