I started to smoke cigarettes when I was about 15 or 16. The ‘tuck shop’ across the street from my high school sold them from ‘under the counter’ – packs of five ‘Woodbines’ or even singly! Back then in the 1950s it was cool and most of my generation started out that way. Almost everyone we knew smoked and you might even have seemed strange if you didn’t!
Of course all the favorite movie stars smoked – Bacall, Bogart, etc.
In the college where I worked you could still smoke anywhere up until the 1980s – classrooms, workshops – wherever – –
I’ve tried often to quit – cold turkey or a pipe but it never worked – –
But for various reasons it is now necessary to bid them goodbye – –
I decided to try ‘vaping’ as both an alternative and a route to stopping completely. That took a bit of a leap in the dark as I know nothing about vaping. But a visit to a local small store and a conversation with the owner explained a lot and so did some research via Dr. Google. Now, vaping isn’t perfect either but at least I’m not sucking actual smoke into me, but mostly water vapor.
Obviously I shouldn’t be encouraging anyone to start vaping for any other reason than as a means of quitting, but I can certainly attest that it is definitely helping me with that. It’s been three days now and I haven’t been tempted to go for a cigarette.
When you get a life-altering diagnosis, you will need some processing time.
So, first piece of unsolicited advice to anyone else finding themselves in this position: allow yourself to get scared, allow yourself to be numb, allow yourself to be angry, confused, in denial. There are no “shoulds” in getting handed a piece of news you don’t want to hear about something inside you.
I got a call last week, right after my weightlifting class, telling me the imaging, which had been for something else, only caught part of what shouldn’t be there, so they wanted me to get another image.
Academics have a default response to being surprised: we research the shit out of whatever it was. This can be mislabeled by well-meaning people as obsessing. You do you. I’m an academic, so I started reading everything that had a realistic chance of being credible online.
Get used to this too: what’s credible is going to range widely across your friends. Don’t go there and don’t let them drag you into “there.” It’s dark and damp and a little too warm and the ground keeps shifting, plus it’s a definite energy suck. Make your own decisions about research, but a little unsolicited advice if I may? Your doctor went to school for 12 years just so she could give you good advice in a situation like this. You might wanna factor that in when you’re deciding what to read and who to believe and what happens next.
And what happens next doesn’t just mean the medical decisions. It means how you feel and what you want to do with your day, week, life. Can you change anything? Should you?
More importantly: do you want to? There’s a lot of crap circling you right now; cut through it.
I’m not ready to disclose what’s going weird yet. Talk to me after Valentine’s Day, which I will say is mildly charming as the day my heart is getting a serious scan. Meta and cute.
After that, we can talk about all the stuff. Right now, I find myself concentrating on enjoying my life. The old trope is true. If you live like you’re dying, you find fascination and cheerfulness in a lot of things. You find dismissal easy for things that are neither joyful nor necessary.
To be clear: I do not plan to go 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu. In fact, there will be no bull at all. My capacity to put up with gaslighting, broken promises, boredom, confusion, and busy work ran for the basement after that phone call—and I locked them in there. Nope, not interested no matter what you say the reward will be for putting up with the crap. Nah.
Now here’s a bit of clarity, team: I am not necessarily dying any faster than anyone else, yet. The diagnosis soundbite for what’s going wrong is more or less “If you allow this to be life-altering, it won’t be life-threatening.”
Yeah. Okay. So very comforting….
I’m not ill. I’m not dying. But I am entering a brave new world of medical necessity with some intensity. I didn’t want to do that. So if I am, I’m going to do it with transparency, dignity, and a wild sense of humor.
Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids 