Thinking, and weighing, and realizing.
That in so many ways I had.
I wish that I didn't have so many regrets, but I do.
Some mistakes are either too big or too old to change.
This reminds me so much of me telling the young fellow I had years ago as my physical therapist I let him know that I had quit smoking after forty years and was into my fifth or sixth year by then of my abstaining when that conversation/incident occurred and all he said to me was that I should have never started. This young man a decade younger than my own sons had said this to me. I was taken aback, it hurt, but he was also completely right.
I never should have begun.
But I did not have helicopter parents or even parents that worried too much about my choices it appeared to me.
I for many years even foolishly told the truth how I began down this rabbit hole... that while on an outing to a bowling alley in the Catskills Mountains in New York State with much older kids, I was twelve and they were fifteen on up and they smoked. I foolishly tried one of theirs left in an ashtray, and that was horrifically when it all began, although, my caveat had and still is until I was fifteen I did not inhale. That is until someone, an older teen teased me by saying then you're NOT REALLY SMOKING, and I took that dare, and that is when I potentially began to ruin my health, since after coughing several times I accomplished the unthinkable by todays standards, and inhaled successfully!
Fast forward forty plus years later when shortly after I had quit, something showed up in my lungs... but alas I was not going to be the pin-up girl for quitting smoking, since fortunately what at first was thought to be COPD or Emphysema turned out to be plain old allergic asthma diagnosed by a real pulmonologist!
Whew!
So now, being a non-smoker for twelve and a half years I have not gone back. I kid that I will when I reach eighty the age that neither my parents nor my brother had reached,! What the heck by then they will probably only exist by buying then from the Black Market at ten to twenty bucks a cancer stick as we so euphemistically have been known to call them, or in my mind trigger maybe smokes?
NOT FUNNY!
,
Although, the weight I gained from quitting plus medication and the inability to exercise makes me wonder, what if I had not quit? Oddly enough, when I smoked I was thin and went to the gym five days a week, and took NO medication at all! That is only because I did not need any.
Since I quit, I have been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, thyroid disease, CKD, fatty liver, chronic pain, and of course asthma!
If I forgot anything it is all here on this blog with my laundry lists of medications in and out!
My one hundred and three pound healthy body rose to over two hundred unhealthy pounds, and I had gastric sleeve surgery two and a half years ago that failed due to the high protein diet causing kidney disease!
I exercised in my pool, since I am a certified aquatics instructor and acquired Squamous Cell Carcinoma on my left cheek that had to have Mohs surgery, circa 2015.
All since 2006!
I am sure that everyone knows that people who are obese are now more prevalent than smokers are, and are more likely to die from obesity related illnesses?
Years ago I sat with a doctor outside of a room that he had been given the grant for studies for medication for arthritis that I at the time was a board member of AF, the Arthritis Foundation. I suggested that smoking illnesses were not any different than other cancer diseases that either that their cause had either a genetic trigger or a malfunction in a person's physiological makeup of their body sets off. My example was at the time the commercial with the twenty-three year old young man acquiring lung cancer from smoking for just two or three years of doing the nasty deed of inhaling and my personal experience with a ninety plus year old woman smoking all those years and not having lung cancer?
I met her when I grabbed a smoke outside an ER waiting for my lip to be stitched up after a dog bite, yep, you heard right smoking with a bloody lip ripped to shreds by our pet collie-shepherd way back in 2000, I ended up having forty-two tiny stitches. Hubby was at a Hurricane Conference in Tampa 100 miles away then. Andrew, a rescue from the hurricane of the same name, the dog did not do that ever before or after. I had rolled over his tail with my computer chair, and when he yelped I asked him if he was alright and he definitely wasn't, and he showed me!
Any-who, taking inventory... so many things that I did.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg as the expression goes.
Oh I am not advocating cigarette smoking people, since there is no way to know if you have that trigger in your system, although now they are making so you can know medically with a DNA blood test that doesn't just inform you of your ancestry, but your possible hereditary health issues!
Good, bad or indifferent, hmm?
Oh by the way that doctor agreed with me on the trigger theory and this was way back in the late 1990s or turn of this 21st Century!
Always sounds like a real-estate company doesn't it? Oh that's right it is, ha!
Anyway, that is just a sample of my stream of consciousness writing, scary, hmm?
Happy good night all!
Count those blessings and we will too!
And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!
So many stories so little time. (All true.)
That in so many ways I had.
I wish that I didn't have so many regrets, but I do.
Some mistakes are either too big or too old to change.
This reminds me so much of me telling the young fellow I had years ago as my physical therapist I let him know that I had quit smoking after forty years and was into my fifth or sixth year by then of my abstaining when that conversation/incident occurred and all he said to me was that I should have never started. This young man a decade younger than my own sons had said this to me. I was taken aback, it hurt, but he was also completely right.
I never should have begun.
But I did not have helicopter parents or even parents that worried too much about my choices it appeared to me.
I for many years even foolishly told the truth how I began down this rabbit hole... that while on an outing to a bowling alley in the Catskills Mountains in New York State with much older kids, I was twelve and they were fifteen on up and they smoked. I foolishly tried one of theirs left in an ashtray, and that was horrifically when it all began, although, my caveat had and still is until I was fifteen I did not inhale. That is until someone, an older teen teased me by saying then you're NOT REALLY SMOKING, and I took that dare, and that is when I potentially began to ruin my health, since after coughing several times I accomplished the unthinkable by todays standards, and inhaled successfully!
Fast forward forty plus years later when shortly after I had quit, something showed up in my lungs... but alas I was not going to be the pin-up girl for quitting smoking, since fortunately what at first was thought to be COPD or Emphysema turned out to be plain old allergic asthma diagnosed by a real pulmonologist!
Whew!
So now, being a non-smoker for twelve and a half years I have not gone back. I kid that I will when I reach eighty the age that neither my parents nor my brother had reached,! What the heck by then they will probably only exist by buying then from the Black Market at ten to twenty bucks a cancer stick as we so euphemistically have been known to call them, or in my mind trigger maybe smokes?
NOT FUNNY!
,
Although, the weight I gained from quitting plus medication and the inability to exercise makes me wonder, what if I had not quit? Oddly enough, when I smoked I was thin and went to the gym five days a week, and took NO medication at all! That is only because I did not need any.
Since I quit, I have been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, thyroid disease, CKD, fatty liver, chronic pain, and of course asthma!
If I forgot anything it is all here on this blog with my laundry lists of medications in and out!
My one hundred and three pound healthy body rose to over two hundred unhealthy pounds, and I had gastric sleeve surgery two and a half years ago that failed due to the high protein diet causing kidney disease!
I exercised in my pool, since I am a certified aquatics instructor and acquired Squamous Cell Carcinoma on my left cheek that had to have Mohs surgery, circa 2015.
All since 2006!
I am sure that everyone knows that people who are obese are now more prevalent than smokers are, and are more likely to die from obesity related illnesses?
Years ago I sat with a doctor outside of a room that he had been given the grant for studies for medication for arthritis that I at the time was a board member of AF, the Arthritis Foundation. I suggested that smoking illnesses were not any different than other cancer diseases that either that their cause had either a genetic trigger or a malfunction in a person's physiological makeup of their body sets off. My example was at the time the commercial with the twenty-three year old young man acquiring lung cancer from smoking for just two or three years of doing the nasty deed of inhaling and my personal experience with a ninety plus year old woman smoking all those years and not having lung cancer?
I met her when I grabbed a smoke outside an ER waiting for my lip to be stitched up after a dog bite, yep, you heard right smoking with a bloody lip ripped to shreds by our pet collie-shepherd way back in 2000, I ended up having forty-two tiny stitches. Hubby was at a Hurricane Conference in Tampa 100 miles away then. Andrew, a rescue from the hurricane of the same name, the dog did not do that ever before or after. I had rolled over his tail with my computer chair, and when he yelped I asked him if he was alright and he definitely wasn't, and he showed me!
Any-who, taking inventory... so many things that I did.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg as the expression goes.
Oh I am not advocating cigarette smoking people, since there is no way to know if you have that trigger in your system, although now they are making so you can know medically with a DNA blood test that doesn't just inform you of your ancestry, but your possible hereditary health issues!
Good, bad or indifferent, hmm?
Oh by the way that doctor agreed with me on the trigger theory and this was way back in the late 1990s or turn of this 21st Century!
Always sounds like a real-estate company doesn't it? Oh that's right it is, ha!
Anyway, that is just a sample of my stream of consciousness writing, scary, hmm?
Happy good night all!
Count those blessings and we will too!
And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!
So many stories so little time. (All true.)
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