|
RETURN TO HELPING OTHERS PAGE
STOP SMOKING, SISTER!
BY Patricia L. Brooks
 Almost twice as many women will die of lung cancer this year as breast
cancer - 70,000 versus 40,000. Lung cancer has a 15% survival rate while
breast cancer is 88% and rising. Most women worry more about their
breasts than their lungs. There is 10 times more marketing, fund
raising, and research for breasts, yet our lungs are at the top of the
cancer high-risk list!
Cigarettes contain acetone, the same entity we find in nail polish.
Cigarettes are made with carbon monoxide, equivalent to what we
encounter on the freeway – a pollutant to the environment. Cigarettes
are finished off with the most addictive drug – nicotine - which is also
used in insecticides - more pollution. Would you drink nail polish,
snort from you car’s tail pipe or ingest your garden supplies. Then ask
yourself why you smoke, stand by, and watch your girlfriends smoke or
allow your daughters or sisters to smoke without trying to intervene?
The “Stop Smoking, Sister!” campaign launched with my book
Gifts of Sisterhood - a celebration of my youngest sister’s life
to lung cancer when she was just 44 years old is my passion. Please help
me bring attention to the necessity for more research, awareness, and
compassion in the area of lung cancer, especially for women. There is no
stigma in having lung cancer.
This call to action takes exception to the tobacco industry targeting
women smoking as glamorous and contributing to weight loss. Join the
fight against polluting the environment with second hand smoke. This is
not about lost jobs in the tobacco industry or stock prices falling;
this is about saving lives and valuing women; an earnest campaign for
all our sisters lost to lung cancer.
My sister was smoke free for 12 years at the time of her misdiagnosis.
Her family doctor said pneumonia, but later the doctors at the Mayo
Clinic in Rochester gave her six months to live a lifetime. They took
out a lung and she fought for almost three years.
Her vibrant beautiful self faded quickly; her fresh look without
make-up, her clean cut appearance and her sparkling eyes as green as
Ireland’s dawn and that freckled face with its mischievous smile are
gone. Did she not know we would miss her so much it would hurt forever;
just subsiding a little each year because grief does somehow get
acceptable and we finally share our grief’s journey with others?
The force of the tobacco industry’s “slick” marketing efforts, lies and
poisons all contribute to an abuse of women and several generations of
beauty passing away unnecessarily. We must stop it now from happening to
the next generations. Anger is still there today in my call to action to
you because you too can buy time, probably a lifetime for your family,
your children or anyone else in your path just by stopping now.
Secondhand smoke is critical to the health and well-being of our
community, especially to women - 20% of the over 70,000 women that died
last year of lung cancer never smoked!
Join the “Stop Smoking, Sister!” campaign in memory of the 70,000
women who will die this year of lung cancer so they do not die in vain.
Help me and the millions of others in the state of AZ and other states
around the country to stomp out smoking by supporting the smoking bans –
the one in AZ goes into effect May 1, 2007. We need to wage a war
against the evils of smoking and the big business of this legal drug.
More women then men die of lung cancer; we are more susceptible to the
hazards of this poisonous product. God made us unique with lung cancer
too – our battle is distinctive and needs special attention now or the
war will be lost forever. We respond differently to the pollutants
involved with smoking, to the lung cancer itself and to the possible
treatments – estrogen is found in the lung cancer tumors of women!
It is not easy to quit – this is an addiction to a powerful drug. You
need help – ask for it. You need support – seek it out. You need a
reason to quit – journal a gratitude list. You need faith that you can
do it – seek God’s help, and others around you that have done it – call
or email me for referrals. There are many programs available if you are
willing to change and to seek help.
Quitting is possible. I have done it too – not as a former smoker – but
as a former drinker. My time came almost 24 years ago when I realized I
was hurting myself and others, when something evil had a hold of me. We
must let it go before it destroys us. Just because a drug is legal does
not make it acceptable. Just because nothing bad has happened yet does
not mean that disaster is not lurking right around the corner!
Will you allow this industry to flourish for another decade and for
another 70,000 women to die next year and the year after just because
you have not been injured yet by this horrible drug? Please seek more
information from the Lung, Cancer, or Heart Associations – they will
give you more ammunition to stop smoking and to live a smoke free life.
Because of second-hand smoke from my father, a three-pack-a-day smoker
and living in a major city for the past 30 years that ranks very high on
the pollution index, I now have seasonal asthma. Taking excellent care
of myself, avoiding smokers and smoking areas helps, but some of my
efforts have been thwarted. The smoking ban in AZ and you will be more
help. God bless you for taking action at this time.
Contact Patricia L. Brooks,
MAOM at patricia@plbrooks.com
or 480-250-5556 -Speaker for Journey from Grief to Gratitude or Stop
Smoking Sister! Workshops and Author of Gifts of Sisterhood
found on Web Site
www.plbrooks.com
President/Founder/P. L. Brooks Seminars, LLC
RETURN TO HELPING OTHERS PAGE
|
