Worried My Past Might Catch Up

Do you have things from your past that you worry about, maybe even worry about it catching up to you? Some might think of an old boyfriend or girlfriend, an ex-spouse, maybe even someone you were just mean to. My worry isn’t about someone, although I have some people that I had less than stellar breaks in our relationships, no, mine is a some thing. I first touched a lit cigarette and inhaled when I was less than ten years old. I remember the car coming down the street, me in the front yard of Maw’s house, the driver casually tossed a cigarette out the window. I must have seen hundreds of these tossed from windows and never thought anything about it. But, for whatever reason, on this day, this time it was different. I walked over, picked it up, put it to my mouth and inhaled. The next five minutes were a blur due to the coughing and watery eyes. You would think this should have been a deterrent, but not for me.

 I found numerous occasions over the years where I would find a chance to puff a drag or two. By the age of fifteen, I was fully inhaling and looking forward to the next one I could get my hands on. This addiction, although minor, still was an addiction and it had grasp on me. Soon, my girlfriend, later wife, was able to steal them by the pack from her parents and we would find ourselves driving around on the backroads just to smoke. We even tried pot a few times, well, for me a few times anyway. The urge to smoke something, anything, was strong and we looked for every opportunity. All the while, I considered myself an athlete and never gave it much thought that an athlete could smoke, yet still excel. By the time I got to graduation, I was full blown smoking a half a pack a day and somehow keeping it from my parents.

The summer following graduation, I worked at a saw mill and smoked freely on breaks. Any thought of being cool was gone years ago, this was now becoming a part of my life. I then left for the military and boot camp. At boot camp, if you smoked, you got longer and more frequent breaks. Often you were smoking with the drill sergeant and got to have a less strict relationship. By the time I left boot camp, I was a pack a day smoker. I had let my parents know that I was smoking and they took it like I have seen them do many times since, with understanding. No lecture or story of the evil sins I was committing, instead they were understanding although they still let me know they weren’t a big fan of it, but I was an adult and it was my choice.

At $2.00 a carton, it wasn’t expensive, but by the time I was to become a father with JD, some four years later, I was near two packs a day. My wife actually stopped with each of the pregnancies, but started back up upon not breast feeding anymore. We didn’t smoke in the house or the car with kids, and established some rules about smoking around the kids. Smoking became a part of life as much as water and breathing. After my divorce, I increased initially, but I started a process to reduce how much I was smoking. In short order, I was down to a half pack or less a day.

Jump ahead to the Christmas prior to turning fifty, I was now remarried and happy, a nurse who was concerned about my smoking and had asked me to stop when I could. By now, I was only smoking three or four a day and thinking that if I could reduce to this amount, I should be able to just quit. Quit, what a great word, because what I failed to mention was that I did quit. For thirteen years, I did not smoke. I wasn’t tobacco free as I would chew tobacco and occasional would puff on a cigar without inhaling. So, the addiction part was still there, but the smoke in the lungs had stopped. When I started smoking again, it was like I never had stopped. I controlled the amount, but like Jen said, you smoke one, it’s the same as twenty. Damage is done. Back to turning fifty, some reason about my lungs didn’t cause my abrupt stopping of smoking, it was my back and the blowing out of a disc that set the wheels in motion to my quitting. A doctor’s explanation about nicotine and effects on oxygen in the process of bone regeneration. The understanding that all of these years, smoking had contributed significantly to the destruction of my back. But this story isn’t about the damage done, but the ongoing anxiety created by it.

Every year since I quit smoking, I have a CT scan of my lungs in an effort that if I was to get cancer, that I would catch it early enough that I might be able to live longer than most patients of lung cancer. My anxiety comes in the fact that I have a nodule on my upper right lung approximately 4mm in size. No telling how lung this has been present, but for the last twelve years it has been present for sure. Every time I’m scheduled to get this procedure done and, in the time, leading up to it, I imagine all kinds of symptomatic things that surely would be attributed to cancer. It would rationalize hearing a report other than benign, that somehow it would account for how I was feeling I might be able to deal with it better. It akin to a soon to be father having some of the same pregnancy issues of their wives. Every year I get a benign report, I feel I’ve cheated death again for another year, and at the hands of my dumb self I feel a lot of regret. If I could go back in time, I would change this one thing and maybe this one thing only. If I had never smoked, then I would not have to worry about my past catching up to me.