No reason for smokers to be mad at me. Please don't be.
I now have small cell lung cancer. Terminal. And of course it's blamed entirely on smoking. (I'm now 49.) I don't believe the spin, and I'm not in denial or making excuses that all those years of the terrible sin of smoking cigarettes is now killing me. The terrible sin I'm afflicted with is reason. People on both sides need a dose of it.
I had breast cancer 15 years ago. Other people in my family have had, and continue to get, cancer of many different kinds. We are genetically predisposed to cancer: cervical, brain, breast, and lung. Most of us also smoke, but most of us don't get cancer. My father died of emphysema but no one else in the family, smokers or not, got it.
If the medical and political communities were more honest, instead of hysterical, more people might listen. I believe smoking may have *contributed* in *my case* to lung cancer, but not that it caused it.
It's too much in one post to get into it, but I'm in the midst of a medical quamire. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, are being cured, and advancing all the time, but lung cancer is automatically considered terminal. Why? Because there's no research money into cure. It's politically incorrect to have lung cancer - there's no sympathy. I've caused my own death, so why throw bad money after it? The medical gestapo has decided that *ALL* SCLC - and ALL NSCLC - is caused by smoking. That's a whole lot easier than trying to figure out other causes of lung cancer. And then everyone else believes it, despite the fact that most smokers don't have any diseases at all.