Breathing After the Smoke

I haven't posted in a few days, having been busy around the house. But that is gonna change after today. Hopefully. Writing in this blog will (once again, hopefully) help exercise my mind and keep me learning new things. Following that line of thought todays post will be about something that strikes close to home to me.

My father has always been a smoker, for as long as I can remember he has had cigarettes blazing and crinkling cellophane wrappers in his pockets or on his dashboard. He has quit the awful habit.. at least twice... but he always fell off the wagon, usually claiming that its hard to not smoke when friends and co-workers do around you. That is until he was diagnosed with emphysema.

Now he can't go anywhere without his inhaler, he can't laugh too hard. Nor can he walk up a flight of steps without stopping for breath or take a hot shower without gasping like a landed fish from the humidity. He is a drywall contractor, and he can only work for short periods of time at a job hes done all his life, and he can't afford to stop or slow down working, because his medicine is so expensive.

I myself have never smoked. Smoking has never looked attractive or cool to me in anyway, nor could I fathom spending so much money on something that would leave me smelling like an ashtray. I've never rebuffed others who do so, usually only moving away when the second hand smoke drifted towards me, I've had no trouble sitting with either of my parents in the smoking section of a restaurant, but now I worry. I worry about the wait staff or what chemicals I'm inhaling in that stream of smoke that passes my face as I breath in.

I guess my point is that smoking has never seemed like the biggest deal. I knew in a peripheral kind of way that it was bad for you, that really bad things can happen to you when you smoke. When my father was diagnosed it brought home the fact that what you do now will affect you for a very long time.