Smoking: Wont Hurt Me, Im a Doctor!

Hi, Im Seth, Im a med student and yes, I do smoke, infact a lot of our future doctors smoke. We like to blame it on the stress we get when its down to crunch time in partial and final exams. But the truth is we smoke even when we are weeks away from our examns.

Yes we are very aware of what smoking does to people, do we care? good question, probably not, why? because we are "doctors" and you guys are the ones that get sick not us.

We seem to think that the lack of air that we get when we have to run up various flights of stairs to the different departments around the hospital is maybe because, since we are going higher up there is obviously less oxygen. Or sometimes we are talking with one of our patients and we have to stop to catch our breath,hack and weeze for air, we make a mental note to pick up more asthma meds, surely after 10 years its back with a vengeance. And most likely that chronic halitosis is caused by the amount of onions you eat each day (I personally hate onions, my bad breath is blamed on garlic).

When I stop to think about everything Ive learned at school and seen at the hospital, I cant help but to think about quiting. I see patients everyday with oxygen tanks and masks. I even remember what one of my teachers told me about trying to inhale while suffering from emphysema (its horrible, inhale all that you can, fill your lungs, now without exhaling, try inhaling more air. Thats breathing with emphysema).

So I decided to have a look and see what is in a cigarette thats got me hooked. I was a bit shocked when I found an article that said the 5 major tobacco companies submited a list to the Department of Health and Human Services back in 1994, with the petit amount of 599 different additives that are found in cigarettes!! A few I know are: ammonia (not good), butyric acid (found in body odor and vomit, yummy), caffeine, decanoic acid (used in the fabrication of plastic and rubber). I think Ill stop right here because Im only at the letter "D" still 22 letters to go, plus 0 - 9.

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Then to make a real effort to kick it, I decided to look at the different things that smoking can cause me: COPD chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema, cancer, heart diseases, myocardial infarction (heart attacks), IMPOTENCE, and many others.

I also thought it would be interesting to see the economical impact smoking would have on me, so lets say right know at age 21 I started to smoke 1 pack of smokes a day at 25 pesos (roughly $2.45 USD) multiply that by 365, it comes out to be $894.00 USD a year, lets say I get to live to the age of 65, so thats 44 years more times the $894.00 it sums up to $39,457.00 USD. Thats a lot of money! and somedays I wont smoke just one pack. And lets say that each pack of cigs has 20 cigarettes so thats 20 a day, 7,300 cigarettes a year, and after 44 years of smoking it would come out to 321,200 cancer sticks! Thats probably the amount of chicken wings me and my families, family will eat throught our lives.

So as I finish up this article, and my cigarette, I cant help feeling bad...not physicaly, and Im not worried about my economic situation either, soon I´ll be a doctor and money wont be a problem. However,I DO feel bad for the rest of you, because in the end, Im not like the rest of you. I, ladies and gentlemen, am a "doctor".