Smoker’s Lungs are Forever

LOOKING BACK AT AN ADDICTION THAT STARTED DURING WORLD WAR II

Photo by KAIBING FAN on Unsplash

I was 13 the year my older sister left for her senior year of college, just before World War II came to an end. Unfortunately for my lungs she forgot about a carton of Lucky Strikes on the closet shelf. By the time I was halfway through those ten packs I was hooked.

In my defense — or by way of explanation — chain-smokers were more common than non-smokers in the 1940s, and in small-town America the sight of young kids smoking on school steps would have raised few eyebrows, if any. (The eyebrows of my parents would have been another matter altogether, but my sisters and I were sneaky enough to conceal these habits for years.)

The above is why my own eyebrows went up over this beginning line of a Quora story that just crossed my screen:

“If you’re a daily or heavy smoker it takes about 7 years for your lungs to clear themselves.” That sent me straight over to the website of my friends at the Cleveland Clinic where they said “if you can stop smoking for several years, your risk of cancer and other health conditions reduces or even returns to the same level as someone who doesn’t smoke.” 

This is not to say everything will just be hunky-dory from then on. Read on for what the Cleveland Clinic says, or check with the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association . . . we know a lot more about nicotine today than in the days when cigarettes were glamorous and chic and omnipresent.

But I can’t help looking back on those days, and telling the story of my poor, once-innocent lungs.

Well into the 1960s, when I was balancing ashtrays while feeding my first two infants, smoking was generally accepted — okay, nobody said it was good for you, but you weren’t labeled a Bad Mom. Gradually, in the 1960s, smoking lost its cool. (Related factoid: for years, bad colds had simply forced me to switch from Marlboros to Kools.) By 1971, when ads were banned and smoke-free areas began to edge smokers out of the way, the reality of nicotine’s multiple harms to the body also began to break through and into the public consciousness.

In 1964, pregnant with my last child, I was so sick that for the first time in my addictive history I could not even manage a smoke. After she arrived I had a moment of clarity: I knew it would be impossible to quit, but since I had temporarily suspended the habit maybe I could manage not to restart. Sixty years later I am still managing not to restart.

You can do this math: I am now sailing into my 90s, still of sound mind and walking three or four miles on most days — so I’m living proof that a history of chain smoking doesn’t always shorten one’s lifespan. Here, though, are a few details within which the devil nicotine may lurk:

Macular degeneration? Maybe I wouldn’t be getting that periodic shot in the eye had I not accumulated 17 long-ago years of chain smoking.

This raspy voice finally curtailing the public speaking I’ve done in behalf of several causes for decades? Vocal therapists have helpfully offered exercises that take 20 minutes three times a day — when I can’t find five extra minutes to finish a blog post. I should never have dropped out of the church choir.

How about that breast cancer I had back at age 72? Virtually every day another link between smoking and cancer is established.

Or unexpected issues with altitude? Without my nicotine-infused history I might still be tackling historic enclosed spiral staircases or visiting Machu Picchu. As is, my daughter brings along a can of oxygen when she meets my plane in Bozeman, MT.

But the cruelest blow of all is when, puffed with pride over a history of sixty years cigarette-free, I wind up a routine exam with the ENT doc to the sound of his muttering voice from behind the X-ray screen:

“Mm-hmmm. Smoker’s lungs.”