(Note: this is a rewrite of a blog I wrote back in 2011,
with maybe a few updates, in the light of recent events.)
Both my parents smoked. I have distinct memories of sitting
in the front seat of our family car, with my father in the driver’s seat on my
left and my mother sitting to my right, both of them puffing away, the ashtray
overflowing. I couldn’t breathe. I finally spoke up about it when I was about
nine or ten years, and it actually inspired my mother to quit smoking.
This, however, didn’t stop me from taking up the habit
myself. I got a free sample of Lucky Strikes at Fenway Park in 1983; I smoked
one or two of them; soon after I was in Morocco, and smoking a pack a day; soon
after that I was in Tunisia and smoking two packs a day.
I kept this up until 1998. Remembering the family proclivity
for cancer, I resolved to quite when I was forty, and I managed it, just a few
months shy of my forty-first birthday.
I have been reasonably healthy on and off since.
And now, fifteen years later, I discover that I have throat cancer,
the main risk factor for which is – ahem – smoking.
Go figure.
I freely acknowledge that it’s my own fault. I knew there
were bad genes on both sides of the family, and I knew that smoking could only
be bad for me. But I kept it up for fourteen years.
Foolish, naturally. Most of those fourteen years between ’84
and ‘98, I was just smoking out of habit; I even (as do most smokers) kept it
up while I was sick with colds and the flu. I even smoked at meals. I was smelly
and utterly obnoxious, and probably nearly burned myself to death more than
once. I realize that now.
But I remember one beautiful morning in Tunis, before I developed
my two-pack-a-day habit. I left the house around 8am, bought a pack of local
cigarettes, lit up, and –
That first puff was heaven.
So it wasn’t all bad.
But it probably wasn’t worth getting cancer for.
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