Lung Diseases And You
Please don’t try to kid yourself. If you have been smoking for any significant length of time (more than a few months) you are quite likely to have the early stages of at least one, and probably more than one lung disease. If you’ve been smoking for years, or worse, decades, well you’ve probably done the Pokemon thing... and and are in the process of collecting them all.
The one that worries people most is cancer, and rightly so. Once you develop a lung, esophageal, throat, mouth, or tongue cancer, unless it is caught really early, it can metastasise (when cells break off the growing mass of the cancer and spread throughout the body, growing cancer masses of their own once they implant), and once it’s spread throughout your vital organs, you are in big trouble. You could get lucky, and have it operable, but more than likely, it’ll be too little too late, and you’ll die from it. Simple as that. I’ve stood looking at the freshly dug graves of too many friends and acquaintances who have died of smoking related cancers, and there is a good chance your friends and family will be doing the same tor you, if you don’t quit, and get your lungs and body cleaned of the tar and toxins cigarettes helped you put in there. As Arni would say... “Do eet, do eet now!” He means quit and detox, of course.
So even if you are one of the lucky few who get through a smoking career without developing any of the dreaded cancers, don’t think you are safe. Far from it. The next biggest disease problem related to smoking is emphysema. Sure, it won’t spread through your body and kill you while you writhe in pain, no, it’ll destroy your lung walls, reducing the surface area of your alveoli (the tiny air sacs in the lungs where gas exchange takes place) until you find it hard to get enough air into your lungs, while your body craves oxygen, and you end up with a face mask and a permanent friend - the oxygen bottle. Because emphysema starts with just a few weeks of smoking, and just continues on with every puff you take, and unlike some other disease caused by smoking, emphysema cannot be reversed with current medical knowledge. Once the inner walls of your lungs are gone, they are gone. No do overs, no callbacks. Gone.
Next on the list of ‘do not wants’ is chronic bronchitis. This is aggravation of your airways to the point that scar tissue forms from where the inner walls of the bronchi (pipes that lead into the deeper lung) have been damaged by smoke and inflammation. This can cause the unshakable smokers’ cough, and make it much harder to clean up your lungs, even after you’ve quit. Some of the scaring damage won’t ever go away either, so that’s bad. Best thing to do is quit early and detox at your earliest opportunity.
So they are the three big ones when it comes to lung diseases, but don’t think it stops there. All the tissues in your body are damaged from smoking, from peripheral vascular disease that causes gangrene in your toes and fingers, to sleep apnea to impotence. Smoking is bad for you, no two ways about it.
So make a change, quit (if you haven’t already), find a good detox program and follow it. You might just give yourself a second chance if you do.
