Friday 26 April 2013

Smoking kill faster...update

If you read this recent post about a woman who continued to smoke despite having been diagnosed with several respiratory diseases, you may remember my last line:

If this woman does eventually succumb to her many pulmonary ailments, I think Dr. K should submit her for consideration of a Darwin Award.

After reading the post, Dr. K emailed me to tell me that about a month after her previous visit, she came back to the ER in cardiac arrest.  Unfortunately Dr. K was not able to restart her heart, and she died.

One could make the argument that if you have a terminal illness, why not enjoy your last few weeks or months and do whatever you want?  Smoke however much you want!  Right?

Sorry, but I can't find any logic to that argument.  Would she have lived any longer had she not been smoking?  Who can say.  But I would argue that the smoking certainly did nothing to help her, and it may indeed have shaved a few days off her already-drastically shortened life.

It's awfully sad either way.

4 comments:

  1. Some people are so addicted that they value smoking more than life. My priest's mom died from smoking, and when she was too weak to move, too weak to lift her head, she spent her last breaths smoking cigarrettes.

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  2. I did radiation treatments with a man with lung cancer. He would leave the clinic, turn off his oxygen and light up. If someone scolded him he would ask "what? You think it will give me lung cancer. I heard he died shortly after I finished treatment. Sad!

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  3. My mother had a lovely lady friend, whom she went out to lunch with quite regularly, and helped her do her grocery shopping. She met her when she was sitting outside a grocery store, sobbing, because she was in so much pain. She'd been to her doctor many times, who'd treated her for UTI's (without doing other tests), and said "Just keep taking your pain medication", and upped the dose each time. She ended up taking something like 6 or 7 times the recommended dose of this very strong painkiller.

    Finally, she was found unconscious in her unit after she didn't answer her morning call on Monday (provided at her units to make sure she was ok). She'd passed out some time on Saturday. At the hospital, they finally discovered she had a perforated bowel.

    Unfortunately, she became the patient of "Doctor Death" (Actually what he was called). This absolute farce of a doctor "repaired" her bowel, and left her incapable of consuming anything other than premature baby formula, I'm assuming due to a narrowing of the bowel. Of course, this left her very weak and feeble, and her daughter decided to drag her down to another town to live with her, away from her friends, and kept her alive. The poor lady couldn't eat a sandwich. She couldn't drink a cup of tea. All she could do was wait for the end. So she kept smoking, as that was the one "luxury" or "feel good" thing she had left. My mother was very upset, yet grateful when her friend finally passed away in her sleep... a mere 4 years after being butchered by the man she'd trusted with her life.

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  4. Malignancy - About 3,000 growth related non smoker passings are specifically credited to uninvolved smoking every year. pipe tobacco online

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