A horrifying moment of truth deeply affects a loving daughter. Read how example affected her. Follow her subsequent soul-searching, and her conclusions.

All of my childhood memories are smoky, not because I can’t remember them clearly, but because both my parents smoked like freight trains. Now, as an adult I am faced with the same addiction while my brother seems to have missed the smoking bullet that is at this moment ripping through my Mothers life. After years of clear chest x-rays and clean bills of health from her physician, she’s discovered that she has Chronic Leukemia and small cell lung cancer.

Fear shot through me to the very core as I sat in the doctors office and listened to her being diagnosed with lung cancer. “How can this be?” She exclaimed. “How can I have lung cancer when all my chest x-rays have come back clean?”

As we intently listened to the doctor calmly try to explain why this once vibrant and energetic woman would meet an untimely death due to something that she once thought basically harmless, we learned that almost all the cases of this particular type of cancer are found in people who smoke. Of course as she aged and as the information was broadcast more and more, she realized that her habit could lead to an untimely death.

Being a smoker myself, I found my mind jumping around to the other health problems she had in the past, as well as comparing my own lifestyle to that of hers. I also found myself blaming her excessive dieting and thus poor nutrition on the fact her body couldn’t fight this developing disease. Oh, but I didn’t stop there. I also dug into her personality and the areas that I felt were flaws of one sort or another. I did so, full well knowing in the back of my mind that while all of these things might have contributed to the condition she is presently in, they weren’t all to blame. My friend, and hers, the cigarettes, were to blame for it. But you know, its hard to turn your back on a friend that has walked with you through a divorce and other hard times simply because someone else had something negative to say about that person, or thing in this case.

Denial is a large part of what drove me to dig in other areas of her life, other areas that really didn’t need digging into. Denial and fear can be a strong motivator, or at least it has been for me. You see, my mother can still breathe just fine. No breathing machines sit beside her sofa where she now spends most of her time. No air tank follows her, at least not yet. She doesn’t cough. There’s no excessive phlegm that might point to some people that she has a health problem. Of course the bald head from the Chemotherapy and the inability to walk very far does tend to tip someone off a bit.

After smoking for fifteen years myself, and managing to stop once for three months, I have made a tough decision. After my upcoming trip to Kentucky next weekend, I am going to come home smoke free. I am going to try to throw down the once comforting smoking habit and hopefully pick up a healthier one. Because, if you knew my Mother and had seen how energetic, creative and smart she was before this happened, you would want to stop too.

I don’t want my life shortened one day shorter than it is meant to be by something that I realize cannot be good for me.

So, farewell to my cancer nails, you’ll not be nailing this gal’s coffin shut!

chronic leukemia, lung cancer, smoking