26 with two months to live...

[claire1979 (deleted)]

Hi, I am a bubbly curvy blonde girl...for now.

All my friends smoke, and they looked so hot doing it and so thinking I'd never be a smoker, I tried my first at the tender age of 19! Ironic seeing as most of them have smoked since they were 11.

Between then and now I ---- out with them. We sit in pubs looking sexy and we always made sure we ensnared the attention of men with our sexy smoking performance. Other than a couple at work in the day, these were the only cigarettes I smoked. I had no health issues I was aware of, none of my mates ever had and they had smoked for over half their lives. I would give up when I was 30, tops. This was fun. Nothing bad would come of it.

I got married last year and my husband was a bit anti-smoking. This bothered me a lot, but I told him I'd quit soon (previous boyfriends had loved S-- play with me smoking). He was worried about health risks and I was like "god, I'm 26...I'm in the prime of my life, I'm young, and sexy too, especially when I smoke".

How ironic that it was to come back on me less than a year later, after multiple sexy speeches about how sexy I find the sexy smoke filling my lungs and caressing them, making love to them before I sexily exhale. It didn't turn my hubby on but it made me wet.

One day a few months later, gettin used to married life I was walking to work and I lit up a cigarette. I did my usual inhale, then exhaled.....OUCH. I had a sharp tingling feeling in the right-hand side of my chest. I took another drag, the same pain again. I didn't have time for this, I was late for work. One more drag, even more pain. For the first time in my smoking life I threw the cigarette down on the floor, not even taking the time to stubb it out.

Over the next few weeks the pain got worse and my husband started asking questions. I told him it couldn't possibly be smoking-related, again I was 26 and untouchable. He urged me to go to my doctor.

I expected the doctor to laugh it off but after examination he said he wasn't liking what my chest sounded like, so he would refer me to the hospital for a chest x-ray.

I had to wait 2 weeks for that and in the weekends between then I was out with my mates as usual, but could not bring myself to smoke. I tried to tell them I was in pain but they could not relate to feeling ill becuase of smoking, becuase the worst they'd had was a slight girly morning cough. I was coughing now like a half-dead yak, and you could see in their eyes they didn't want me to ruin their moments. The weekend after that I was alone in the house, while they all were out. I was wheezing. I could barely breathe. I was scared.

I had my chest x-ray and had to wait an agonizing week. It seemed to last forever then I got a phone call to tell me to come in the next day as they needed to see me about my results. I was terrified. I lit a cigarette for the first time in 2 weeks and I could barely inhale. I stubbed it out, panicking.

I went to the hospital and they sat me down. I'll spare you the details, the pace of how they told me, my reactions and emotions. They told me I had a cancerous tumour on my lung, and they estimated it was the size of a golfball. You can't imagine how I felt.

They told me without pulling any punches that my prognosis was bad, that I'd have to have chemo first and then they would want to operate. They told me all the stuff about losing my hair and all I could hear was my own sobbing and wheezing.

Its amazing how trivial a fet--- can become when something so much bigger is caught up in it. For me it disintegrated in seconds. Why had I taken up smoking. IT WASN'T FAIR! My friends had smoked since school, surely they had more reason for this. IT WASN'T FAIR.

In an ironic way I still see women smoking as sexy, and think its sexy that they believe they're untouchable in their twenties. I know this is a pro-smoking board but I have to at least tell people this story, so they know it can happen to anyone.

Enjoy the rest of your lives. This may be my last post.