Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Working on becoming the world’s youngest laryngectomy patient?
Toddler down to 15 cigarettes per day.
That links to a video of a rather chunky three-year-old (by my guess) puffing like a veteran. As docs, we regularly take a smoking history from our patients. Do you use tobacco? Smoke, chew . . . which? How much? When did you start?
This all translates into a metric, the “pack-years” logged by the patient. The earlier you start and the more you smoke, the higher your pack-years. All of us remember our record-holder. Mine was 120. How does a sixty-something guy log 120 pack-years? By starting at age five and averaging two to three packs per day.
How does this happen? Uncles, grandparents, sometimes even parents give the kid a cigarette — you know, because it’s cute. And we’re talking about nicotine, one of the most (if not THE most) addictive substance known to humankind, more addictive than heroin or cocaine. Doesn’t make much work to turn the kid into a coffin nail junkie.
These kids, they’d probably be doing themselves less damage swigging 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. And they’d look much cuter doing it, too.
The things we do to our kids . . .
D.
I’ve never smoked – well, that’s not *quite* true. Family stories insist I snagged a lit cigarette butt from my mom’s ashtray when I was about two, took a drag, and promptly got sick – but when I was about 20 I got pneumonia and ended up in the ER. The doc asked the usual ‘how much do you smoke?’ questions and he absolutely refused to believe I didn’t. It was just constant exposure to second hand smoke (this was back in the early 80’s when it wasn’t as well documented). I still have respiratory problems from time to time, all thanks to my parents both having 2+ pack a day habits. I barely noticed smoke when I was a kid, but now that I’m almost never around it, my throat closes up if my mom smokes near me. It’s awful. I can’t imagine putting that crap in my body on purpose.
My first month in college, I bought a pack of clove cigarettes. All part of the “I’m away from home I can do whatever the hell I want now” thing, plus I liked the way they smelled. How they tasted was quite a different story. I didn’t finish two cigarettes and then threw the pack away. Blech. Addictive or not, I don’t understand how people come to like it in the first place.
Ah, Krakatoas! It’s not the smoke, which was evil. It was the sweet clove taste on the lips. High concept – low reality. Do people still do those things?
I still smell ’em on occasion, so someone must be doing them. Although now that I think about it, have you noticed that fewer and fewer people smoke in public? Maybe it’s different in Europe . . .