Latest Voices

Let’s call her Doris (though that was not her real name). She was as lovely as could be last winter. She had been up on the fifth floor for weeks, but just couldn’t wean herself off less than 8 liters oxygen to go home. She made no excuses; her lifetime of smoking had left her lungs both restricted and obstructed. On rounds, we started to discuss the likelihood of her going to a facility, rather than seeing her new grandbaby, a choice she understandably can’t fathom.

As a family physician for over forty years, I’ve dedicated enormous time and effort to ending tobacco use through a non-finger-wagging approach to patients in the clinic and the hospital, as well as through the use of humor and parody to students in middle schools and high schools.

Few conditions demand more of patients and their physicans than the journey, the odyssey, to becoming a former smoker.

Hello. My name is Sharon and I am an addict. My drug was tobacco. Exposed early, by smoking parents, I tried tobacco in high school and was quickly dependent. It calmed me. It gave me something to do with my hands. I smoked out my window at home and, when I could, other places. I was not alone. This was 1964.

In the mid-1970s, as a preschooler, I used to stare at a poster in the waiting room of my pediatrician’s office. This poster depicted a disorderly person, dark hair unshorn, snarling and puffing on a cigarette. The poster’s caption: Smoking Is Very Glamorous.

Several months ago, I was in an appointment with “Richard.” Richard was a 45-year-old Italian-American construction worker, a father of three (four if you counted Gerald, his family’s new labradoodle puppy—which I did), and a devoted husband to his wife, Sherri, his high-school sweetheart. Unfortunately, none of these descriptors explained why he and I were in the same exam room. That was because I am a medical oncology scribe. I write notes for an oncologist. Richard was our patient: a former smoker receiving treatment for Stage IV lung cancer.