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daggiesmom

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In December 1997 I recieved the crushing news that I had lung cancer! I had gone to the doctor thinking that the pain I had was due to moving back to Minnesota and the unpacking. I knew as an RN that pain was not an early sign of lung cancer. I cried all the way home. Thus my journey began. My story is posted at lchelp.org a web site set up to support those diagnosed with lung cancer and their families. I am Donna G at the site.

When I was a young teenager I thought smoking made me look and feel "grown up". My Mother smoked cigarettes and Dad smoked a pipe. When I entered nursing school after graduating from High School we were not allowed to smoke in uniform. The patients smoked at their bedsides and the doctors smoked at the nurses station.

I married a Navy man tall and handsome. The military gave them free smokes at times, sold discounted smokes on base and at "sea" sold sea stores for $1 a carton!

In a few years I began to understand people really did get sick and cough etc who smoked. My mother was developing a bad cough. I wanted to quit and I really tried and tried. I could kick them for a few months and my husband would come home and say "We are being moved to San Diego" and the stress of another move would make me take that "just one" and I was hooked again.

I began working in an intensive care unit and really did not want to smell like a cigarette while I was teaching my patient who just had a heart attack the reasons he should quit smoking. For years I was able to shower , go the whole day without, then after a stress filled day just really "need" just one on the way home.

Being told I had lung cancer finally was enough to get me over the hump. I have never smoked again. It is nearly 8 years. I must say with the help of Wellbutrin and a smokers annonymous support group. I was just reading the book by James Frey, In a Million Pieces. He decribed how he would dream he was using his drugs of addiction and the dream was so real. He said this is commom for addicts. I thought how correct you are! I often dreamt that I had a cigarette and was enjoying it. My mother finally died of COPD. The last years she was in a nursing home and could not smoke their. She told me also how she dreamt of smoking and even til death she said how she just loved to smoke!

I pray that we quit depending on Cigarette "sin" taxes to balance our state and federal budgets, that people really learn early in life how to cope without needing --

This is what I posted on their Quit Message Board. They made me stop. (LIMITED how long)

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Great way to vent but don't know if it will work. Was nice to blow off steam at somebody for something. If DISNEY the family series is doing what it sounds like; think about the series they are running and who they are blaming. Know what I mean?!

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