I was married at 27, had my daughter at 29 and was widowed at 31. My husband had smoked for years before I met him and continued throughout our marriage. We were excited over his being appointed Press Secretary for a newly elected U.S. Senator from our state. We had moved across country from Seattle to Washington, D.C. just six-months before he became ill.

Amazingly, that day in June started out like any other, except that I had agreed to pick him up from the subway station at a D.C. suburb. He had become so confused on the train that he couldn't remember which stop was his. His co-workers would later tell me that he had been acting strangely the past few days at the office (not quite like himself).

The strange behavior - the doctors later advised - was due to a severe potassium depletion caused by his illness. My husband was diagnosed a few weeks later, but first had to suffer the indignity of spending a night in jail and several weeks in a psychiatric hospital while they tried to figure out what was wrong with him.

It wasn't until he asked for a chest x-ray that we discovered he had a quarter-sized darkened area located toward the center of his lungs. We thought ok, now we at least knew what the problem was and (besides), people could live with one lung. We were buoyed ONLY temporarily. When the diagnosis came down it was; small cell lung cancer, inoperable and fully mytastisized.

We came back home to our family and friends in Seattle, fought hard, celebrated our last Christmas together and I watched my wonderful, sweet, gentle husband try to say goodbye to his baby daughter. His Masters Degree in Journalism from Columbia University offered little help to him now.

My husband died 25-years-ago this last July 4th and I still think of him at least once every day. My daughter looks astonishingly like her dad although he promised otherwise. But possibly the saddest part of this story is that my beautiful, funny, smart 28-year-old daughter, has been smoking since she was 16. I remember what went before and worry about her everyday.

Sincerely,

Linda Boyce-Smith

My husband and I have been married for 32 years and for the past 32 years I have asked him to quit smoking. Of course his reaction was very defensive and I was basically told to mind my own business. I tried to remind him that HE WAS MY BUSINESS. I love him dearly and knew that his smoking was a detriment to not only himself but to others around him. Nicotine is one of the hardest addictions to overcome. My husband finally quit smoking in August of 2007. Unfortunately we had purchased cigaretts over the internet. In July or August of 2007 we received a bill from the state of Pennsylvania for almost $2,000.00 for taxes on the cigaretts we had purchased on line. My husband then decided that he was not going to continue to pay any more taxes for a ridiculous habit he has had for the past 53 years. This doesn't end the story. In December 2007 my husband was given the unfortunate news that he now has lung cancer. Now he is paying the price not only financially but with the pain and suffering of cancer and chemo therapy/radiation due to this disgusting habit. I thank Wegman's for not selling this "drug", nicotine in their stores. Hoping their decision to do this inspires other businesses to do the same.
I have grandchildren and I look forward to their future nicotine free.

I started smoking at age 16. At about age 26 I begin to quit. I quit every New Year, every birthday, every valentines day, every year on my daughter's birthday, ect. She used hope that this next time I would actually quit. I would stay off of them for a couple of days, a week, a month, even 3 years. But I would think I could have a drag off of someone else's, or just one while I had this beer, or this cup of coffee and then I would be a pack a day smoker again. One puff, and I am a smoker again. That's how addictive they are to me. Once I figured out that I could NEVER have even one drag off of a cigarette again, I finally stayed quit. I have been a non-smoker now for 11 years. But sometimes I smell one from across a parking lot and I feel my body reach out in craving for them. I still think about having one, usually once a week or so. My two oldest children remember when I smoked, my youngest does not. I hope they never even try cigarettes, because for me they are fatally addictive.

I have a father who smokes almost a half a pack a day. I don't know if the medicines would help him or not. I am willing to do anything to make him stop, for my safety and him.

When I was 10 Years old I was Diagnosed with Perthes Disease. It is a hip disease where your Femur Deteriorates. The hardest part was learning that I got the disease from second hand smoke. My mother was a horrible smoker. from that day I heard that I promised myself I would never smoke, and convince as many people as I can not to. I had to go through 5 major surgeries, and be in a body cast for 6 week, just because my mother smoked. Still to this day, my mother doesn;t believe thats what caused my disease, but it's a fact, not an opinion that that is what cuased it. Thank God she stopped smoking, and now I am 16 and good and healthy

As a former employee of the restaurant industry at a time when smoking was allowed, I can honestly say that there was no choice about where to work. To this day, I have never held a job where I made more money than I did when I worked in the restaurant industry. (In fact, I think my husband wants me to go back!) For most of my career there, I worked part time at the restaurant and full time somewhere else. I still always made more money working three or four nights a week in a restaurant or bar than I ever have in the "real world." For six months time I worked full time in the restaurant industry as an assistant manager, and I was lucky in that I had partial healthcare coverage. It would take me one night of waiting tables or bartending to make enough money to cover the rest of my insurance costs. The smoke was awful and unpleasant, and it made me ill at times, but when you saw how much money you made in a weeks time, it was something you just put up with. The interesting part for me, was that at the establishment where I worked, most of us had college degrees, some were even working on graduate degrees and one of my dear friends was working on her PhD in Physical Therapy. It was not as if we didn't understand or didn't know the health effects of working in secondhand smoke. The cost of working somewhere else was just too great.