Coughing up a Lung

Many people have experimented with smoking, and the coughing, hacking and nausea involved. Some people through the cancer stick on the ground and can not fathom why anyone would want to smoke. Other people push through the preliminary torment and become addicted.

I was 13 the first time I smoke a cigarette, but it wasn’t not for the reasons you may think. My dad had been smoking for over thirty years and my mom thought that if everyone in the family smoked a cigarette in front of him the would quit smoking…Looking back I do not see the logic in this plan. Instead of buying regular or light cigarettes, my mom bought “Camel non-filtered.” Everyone smoked one in front of my dad, to no avail so my brother Philip and I continued to smoke. We finished off the pack in about 30 minutes. Taking into account that I weighed at the most 100lbs, smoked over ten cigarettes, and am allergic to smoke, I got very sick with nicotine poisoning. All I wanted to do was lay down and die. I was very nauseous, green and my entire body was wrapped in a thick blanket of pain. My mom called a family friend who happened to be a Paramedic, and asked him what to do. He said that I needed to be active and burn off the toxins in my body. As you can imagine moving from my bed was the last thing I wanted to do. My brother Marcus and his wife had to drag me out of bed and had the audacity to make me play basketball. There I was at 11pm playing basketball with limbs that wouldn’t respond correctly and 50lbs eyelids. Surprisingly the exercise helped and after 20 minutes I started feeling better. This horrendous ordeal to try to get my dad to quit smoking, but it was to no avail. You would think that I learned my lesson and would never touch a cigarette again…guess again.

I was about 17 when my friends and I decided to be cool and start smoking. We started by stealing my dad’s and brother’s cigarettes. Over time one smoke here and there would not satisfy our cravings so we began to find people who would buy cigarettes for us. At one point we could not find any cigarettes and were going insane trying to find some. In my backyard we had a bushel of straw, and had the brilliant idea to smoke it. After coughing for 20 minutes, we decided that not everything can be smoked. We continued smoking for about 4 months, but I decided to stop when I began waking up in the morning needing a cigarette. I tried to convince my friends to quit smoking, but they just gave me the excuse “I can quit anytime I want to.” To this day they still smoke. It took me 5 years to get to the point where I no longer craved a cigarette every time I got stressed out. To this day I am still a non-smoker, yet I feel sorry for the people huddled in the smoking sections of campus trying to stay warm and dry.