[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by M G F on June 4, 2009, 3:16 pm, in reply to "Nice excerpt"
Very Nice!
Actually seeing the human lungs in action is a wonderful experience I feel privileged to have had as an advanced practice nurse. My first look at a smoker’s lungs was also special.
I was 27 years old and was finishing the practicum part of my master’s degree. To learn various techniques, we would “operate” on teaching cadavers. The first few sets of lungs I saw were in non-smokers ranging in age from mid-forties to late seventies. They were what I had been led to expect – clean and healthy with only the slight discoloration that comes from air pollution, but still smooth and predominantly pink. Them we “operated” on a 26 year old woman who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. I did not know, until we opened her chest, that she had also been a smoker. Then I saw them, black, the surface irregular, the light and airy appearance of the other lungs I had seen replaced by a heavy dark wetness. My mental image of lungs was permanently changed that day. It is one thing to see photographs in a book and quite another to see the actual organ nestled in a smoker’s chest, the damage she has caused blatantly obvious. I had been smoking for about 20 pack years, and knew that my lungs were undoubtedly just as dark and altered as those of the 26 year old woman before me. I wondered how I would feel when I lit my next cigarette. For some reason, I refrained from smoking until I got home that evening. Sitting on my porch, a glass of wine at my side, I took a cigarette from my pack and lit it, the image of the woman’s lungs firmly in my mind as I drew the smoke into my mouth and then into my lungs until they were completely inflated. I held the smoke and savored it, knowing that when I exhaled every alveolar surface would have a fresh coating of tar. Somehow, coming in closer contact with the consequences of the Risk had made it all the more appetizing.
Since then, I have been present at a number of major thoracic surgeries, and whenever the patient has been a smoker, it has only heightened the pleasure I take from my own smoking.
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