I read amgdenny's intro over on whack the pack and it struck a chord with me as my mother also died from emphysema caused by smoking. She was 54 years old.
Long before the public knew the dangers of smoking, my mother's addiction began...perhaps in her early teens. She struggled and survived a horrific childhood at the hand of an alcoholic father...became a mother of 4 boys, of which I am the youngest. Did all she could to make sure that we had it better than she did. Throughout the years she watched what she ate, exercised, spent a great deal of time outdoors, but smoking was something that she just couldn't give up, Lord knows she tried many times...all the while big tobacco was studying their market, manipulating nicotine levels, covering up damaging evidence of health risks, making inroads with Hollywood, targeting young people. Accountants figuring profit margins, attorneys doing damage control, and the machine continued on ...
What did that mean for my mother....It meant a slow death...as breathing became less and less efficient, her blood oxygen levels fell. Organs began to become oxygen starved, and began to slowly fail... All the while, the nicotine doing it's job...keeping my mother using cigarettes up to the point where she was no longer physically able. step 1. use oxygen, step 2 remove oxygen. step 3 smoke step 4 stop when coughing too much to smoke. 5 goto step 1. She died after 4 years of daily suffering- a mother to me. A statistic to be added to a tally for big tobacco. They lost a customer, one of hundreds of thousands...mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. And still they meet in board rooms, studying how to introduce more to the horror of nicotine addiction. The wake they leave behind is a trail of dead bodies, oxygen machines, cancer drugs, misery, disfiguring surgeries, amputated limbs. It is a despicable business.
As I left the hospital the day my mother died, I swore in the memory of my mother I would never support big tobacco with my business again. But already the nicotine withdrawal had begun...big tobacco tugging my strings as a marionette. I was their puppet for 15 more years. I daily thought about that promise to stop supporting big tobacco.
162 days ago I did something about that promise. The death of my mother was not enough to strengthen my resolve enough to stop using. I didn't stop using until I came here. This program of accountability across cyberspace works. And it works as written. To change it is to weaken it. Drink the kool aid.
Thanks to all that keep this site going. I am finally able to keep my last promise to my mom, may she be dancing on the streets of heaven.
