NVaine's Weblog

I sleep, I eat, I work. I drive a 13 year old vehicle because even if I could buy a new one, I wouldn’t want to. I read and visit friends and try to volunteer my time and work really hard to take really average photographs and I do all of the other things that make me a human being.

A friend suggested I should start a blog. I’m doing it because I hope to remember what life was like before my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.

I waited too long to start this blog.

At this hour of the morning, I have no idea if any of this makes sense.

I used to think that it was your business, and yours alone, if you choose to smoke. After being exposed to smoke for my entire childhood I’m very sensitive to it, so if someone smoked nearby, I’d get up and leave without a word. If friends smoked in their homes, I’d meet them in restaurants. It’s their home, I thought, and it’s not my place to say what they cannot do there.

I realize now that it is not just your business if you choose to smoke. You are affecting the people closest to you, as well. Even if they never breathe a particle of your second-hand smoke, you may still put them through hell. It’s possible that someday your loved ones are going to be the ones holding your hand while you get biopsied, mopping up the substances which have exited every orifice of your body during chemotherapy, trying to manage your finances as well as theirs, trying to figure out how to pay for all of this wonderful treatment, and
lying
awake
for
hours
every
night
worrying
about
you.

And they’ll be the ones standing at the front of the room at your funeral.

If you smoke, please read my blog. Watch what I go through as my mother fights her lung cancer. And ask yourself if you want your loved ones to experience this hell.

If I hear from one person, just one, who says “I never thought about it this way, I never knew what this could do to my family,” it will make me think that there’s a reason for all the suffering my mother is going through. If I can save just one family from this, it will almost be worth it.