--snip--

I may have mentioned this before to you but I'll say it again though it's a painful subject, to say the least.

I have been the worst kind of fool. I kept smoking long after I knew what it was doing to me. I had severe bronchitis, near pneumonia several times and still I smoked. My wife quit and begged me to quit too and still I smoked. That was 20 years ago when my son was born.

In 2004, I was diagnosed with kidney cancer and, much to my shame and embarrassment, still I smoked.

I was sneaking around and hiding my smoking like a teenager smoking in the boy's room at high school. I was 44 years old.

I was very embarrassed and ashamed that I was still smoking and I imagined that no one knew. Of course they knew. You can't hide that smell from a non-smoker no matter how hard you try.

People were polite enough to pretend along with me though, for the most part.

2 years later they found the nodules in my lungs and incredibly, still I smoked.

Every night I went to sleep in fear and swearing that I would never smoke again - every morning I would eventually go buy another pack. Sometimes I'd fight it for a while but most often I didn't even bother to try. I felt hopeless.

There were periods of not smoking as long as a year or more spread through out this story but I always ended up smoking again at some point.

On my tombstone, they should just put up a drawing of Joe Camel.

When they told me they needed to cut my chest open to do the lung biopsy last month (or was it 2 months?) I quit again for perhaps the hundredth or maybe thousandth time. I have not smoked since.

When the brain tumor presented itself in early feb. 2007 , I had been not smoking for barely 2 or 3 weeks. I have not smoked since but I am already getting occasional cravings and I am terrified that once I'm all healed up and feeling my old self (if that ever happens), I'll smoke again.

I don't *think* I will and I'm sure as hell not planning to but..... (Of course, if I ever do smoke again, I won't have to worry about cancer cause if my wife found out, she'd surely kill me herself ;) )

By the way, feel free to share this post with anyone you know that smokes or even if they don't, especially young people.

So did my 35 years of smoking cause my kidney cancer? There is no way to ever know. You can draw your own conclusions but I know what I believe.

Maybe if I had stopped after my original diagnosis in 2004, I'd still be sitting safe at Stage 1 instead of where I am today. Like a fool, I never believed that something this bad it could happen to ME and even if I had, it may not have helped because I was as addicted as any hardcore junkie is to his needle.

--snip--