Coughing up a Lung

Many people have experimented with smoking, and experienced the coughing, hacking and nausea involved. Some people throw the cancer stick on the ground and can not fathom why anyone would want to smoke. While other people push through the preliminary torment to become addicted. This is my experience with the world of smoking.

I was 13 the first time I smoke a cigarette. I did not smoke to be cool or due to peer pressure. I smoked because of my mom but not in the usual sense, like stress. My dad had been smoking for over thirty years, and my mom thought my dad would quit if everyone in the family smoked a cigarette in front of him, looking back I do not see the logic in this plan. Unfortunately, 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 decided to finish off the pack. 20 minutes and 15 cigarettes later we accomplished this. Taking into account that I weighed at the most 100lbs, smoked about ten cigarettes, and was allergic to smoke, I got very sick with nicotine poisoning. All I wanted to do was lay down and die. I was nauseated, green and 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 in order to burn off the toxins in my body, yet moving from my deathbed was the last thing I wanted to do. My brother Marcus and his wife had the audacity to drag me out of bed and make me play basketball. There I was at 11pm playing basketball with limbs that wouldn’t respond correctly and a brain shrouded in fog. Surprisingly the exercise helped and after what seemed like an eternity I started feeling better. I survived this horrendous ordeal to try to get my dad to quit smoking, and I should have learned my lesson.

I was about 17, when my friends and I decided we wanted to be cool and started smoking. We started by stealing my dad’s and brother’s cigarettes, but only one or two a week so they would not notice the missing cigarettes. Over time one smoke here or 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 or money to buy some, so we were going insane trying to find something smoke-able. In my backyard we had a bushel of straw, and hastily decided to try smoking some. We stood there with a lighter in one hand and a piece of straw it the other. No one wanted to be the first to try, so we lit the straw at the same time. We thought it is going to be great, until we inhaled. After that first puff we knew me had miscalculated, when our eyes became red and teared up, our nosed began to run and our throats became raw and scratchy. After coughing for 20 minutes, we came to the realization 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 craving 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, who did not stop after that first cigarette, huddled in the smoking sections of campus trying to stay warm and dry.