The consequences of my bad habits.

I was a smoker for many years. I started while I was still in nursing school, when I was about 17 years old and then I kept on smoking for about 10 years. But this is a story already told, I just wanted to make a preamble to the following.

Today I have the consequences of having damaged my lungs with cigarettes, adding to this fact is my genetics which have a history of lung inflammations in almost all the generations following my parents, and we are already on the third.

I continually suffered from respiratory ailments while I was enduring the cold at the university where I was educated, but I love cold weather and always endured my respiratory ailments for many weeks. Until I decided to take a good treatment to completely eliminate the condition.

I quit smoking because it prevented me from having enough inspiratory capacity on the steep streets where I had to walk every day. The city is built on a mountain range so to walk down to the university I had no problem, but whenever I had to walk up I always arrived home panting.

I spent all this time thinking about whether or not to quit smoking, until I did.

Then I moved on to other cities with tropical climates, like the rest of my country. But there the road dust affected me again. To the point that the ENT doctor who was treating my tonsil problems, which were very frequent, warned me that I should move to a place where I would not inhale so much dust.

I couldn't really think on a place like the one that he was suggesting, because I spent the last 18 months of my studies in a purely agricultural and cattle-raising town where the authorities took very little care of their roads, since what mattered to them was to take advantage of the riches of the land.

So wherever I went, there was land traffic with poorly maintained roads and a lot of dust, but I was able to resist. The last treatment I had there was very traumatizing, injections in the muscle every other day for up to 4 times.

I made it, my tonsillar affection went away for the rest of my internship there and it just came back already being in my busy city today. Apparently this is where I am less frequently affected by respiratory infections.

Today I am affected again. I have bronchial spasms, they do not limit my daily activities but I do have a wheezing in my chest at night.

Because of this I have not yet been able to get my first covid vaccine. Apart from my desire not to do it voluntarily, now there is the fact of my constant bronchial wheezing.

I take some infusions of my plants, which I know as very appropriate for respiratory ailments. The “oregano orejon”, the “small oregano”, this is the one used in pizzas, also “malojillo” and “Santa Maria” as well as fig leaves and soursop leaves. They all help me, I don't take them together and I don't take them always, but from time to time I take them and they are helpful.

We have to be responsible with our body, I'm not going to say that I regret making bad decisions since these decisions helped me to be what I am today, but I also know that there are many people who smoke and nothing happens to them.

Their bodies are more resistant, they don't have unfavorable genetic inheritance and they are not frequent smokers in many cases.

I’ll tell you several cases of patients I have seen in my professional life with tumors in their bodies related to their smoking habits.

I had one patient who was very physically active, exercised, took care of her meals, and had a very good attitude, but she often smoked a cigarette or two for many, many years of her life. She came to my office for a check-up on her abdomen because it was routine for her job.

Everything was fine until I got to her bladder, it had a small lump, that's when I started asking her questions and the only detail in her life was her smoking habit.

Then she went and did all her studies and tests. She came back the following year for another check-up and there she told me that her tumor was cancerous, she was treated with all the needed protocols and came out of it all fine, according to the studies it was thought that this tumor had something to do with smoking.

I saw a different lady with a tumor in her pancreas. She was not so lucky… She died months after they tried to treat her for pancreatic cancer. It was detected too late, her disease was brought thanks to her smoking habit.

Another patient also came to me and all she presented with was loss of taste and smell. She used to smoke exhaling the smoke through her nose and of course also her mouth. She did not die from it but she spent many years of her life with no taste for food and no perception of smells of any kind.

What I mean by all this that if we can live peacefully without having to smoke it would be the most sensible thing to do. We don’t know when the date of our death is but what we do know is that smoking accelerates the predisposition to a more rapid death by some disease caused by this bad habit of smoking.

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