My Bladder Cancer Fight

It is a fact that tobacco damages your health.

Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, cancer of the mouth, throat, bladder, pancreas and kidney. This fact should be enough to tell us that we should never smoke but we do not listen. We carry on smoking ignoring all the medical warnings until something happens to us. Then we might or might not do something about this addiction.

I am a perfect example of this. I began smoking around 20 years of age, because all my friends were smoking, and did nothing about my own addiction until something happened to me. I developed bladder cancer. I am still smoking a little. Every time I go on a program to stop, the withdrawal from nicotine is more than I can handle. If you have never gone through a withdrawal then you will have no idea what I am referring to here. I am totally out of the picture. I need to go into a rubber room somewhere and fight it out. I do want to be smoke free but having gone through most of the smoking aids on the market, I have failed to stop completely. I have too. I need too. I will.

Tobacco is addictive. Some say that it is much harder to stop using cigarettes than it is cocaine. Nicotine, a powerful addictive drug, is the main ingredient in cigarettes. It can be a killer.

Once you begin to eliminate nicotine from your system, things begin to happen.

This can bring on changes in mood, depression, hallucinations, vomiting and stomach upsets. These changes are an indication to you that the nicotine is no longer circulating in your body. There is no set time as to how long these will last. It can depend on many factors such as amount you were smoking, length of time you were smoking and your level of addiction. These changes will pass. But as these changes are going on it can be hell for you and for the people around you.

Within the first few weeks you will gradually start to have:

- better smelling hair and clothes
- better, sweeter breath
- better breathing gradually less wheezing
- gradually cleaner and whiter teeth
- food begins to taste better

One thing that you have to keep an eye on is any increase in weight that may occur as food begins to taste better. If your food tastes better, there will be a tendency to eat more. By eating more, your weight will go up. Keep a handle on this. Don’t end up trading on addiction for another.

The most shocking statistic that I found in my research is that if a smoker began smoking around 18 years of age, over 400,000 of them will die from tobacco related causes each year.

Don’t become one of these stats.

Posted on February 4th, 2008 by Neil
Filed under: Bladder Cancer - Smoking, My Cancer