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A Final Word
But I Was Cool
by Billy Whelan
At 13, I desperately needed to be cool. My Dad had a carton of Camels in the garage. I waited until it was nearly half empty and borrowed a pack, telling myself I would replace it someday. Hence began a 25-year cigarette habit that almost killed me.
But I was cool.
When I was in my late 30s, every morning upon arising, I started coughing up large black chunks of some nasty looking, foul smelling, gooey stuff. I also had a constant cough.
But hey, I was cool.
The problem was that I was addicted to nicotine—like a junky to a fix.
After the medical examination, the doctor told me I had a pre-cancerous lung and showed me the x-ray with the large offending spot. He further explained that it could turn into full cancer at any moment.
Wait a minute—no one had told me about cancer. People die from cancer. I was only 35 years old.
Yes, Mr. Whelan, smoking does cause cancer. Where have you been, Billy boy?
Lung cancer?
But I was cool!
A few weeks later, still undecided as to what to do, I had the occasion to visit a friend in the hospital. He had another visitor who had cancer of the jaw from smoking. The doctors had surgically removed his lower jaw from below each ear and had sewn an artificial aluminum jaw onto his face. He looked like he had walked right out of the Star Wars bar scene. He couldn’t talk because his tongue had been amputated, so he wrote on a note pad. He made these disgusting gasping sounds and was so addicted to nicotine that he would get a cigarette burning and then try to inhale the smoke from the burning end. You see, he had no lips with which to suck in the smoke; they had been removed also.
He wasn’t cool!
And I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn’t either.
I felt like someone on an airplane that’s about to crash. It’s really too late for them to take another flight. But I thought maybe I could change my flight. That day was the last cigarette I ever had.
I wasn’t afraid to die, but Star Wars was out of the question, as was being hooked up to some machine for the rest of my life or having to drag around an oxygen tank. How could I surf lugging around some damn oxygen tank?
So I quit smoking—cold turkey! Was it easy? Hell no, but the alternatives were out of the question. Since then I’ve found out that no one escapes from tobacco related diseases. It’s like a time bomb waiting to go off, and it will go off.
Oh wait, some people do escape. They die prematurely from some other tobacco-related ailment, like heart disease. Maybe that’s a cooler way to die.
Well, that’s my story. I’m now a healthy, surfing, 73-year-old who intends to live a long healthy life. No thanks to tobacco.
Billy Whelan is a spiritual healer on the island of Kauai. Visit www.familypeacegroup.org for more information.