I’m a smoker. Oh no! you say, Not one of those. It’s true. I started smoking in nursing school, of all places. Between the stress, and the fact that my best friends in nursing school smoked got me hooked. And most of the night shift nurses I’ve worked with over the years smoked. Back in 1993, when I started nursing, you could smoke in the nurse’s lounge. Before that, from what I was told, you could smoke at the nurse’s station. Slowly, but surely, smoking was moved to an indoor lounge, and then outside the building. Now you can’t smoke in the parking lot of our local hospital.
But now I’m disabled and home all day. It’s a lot easier to smoke in your house than anywhere else. I used to smoke a half-pack a day; now I’m up to about one and a half packs a day. And it’s time to quit. But here’s the problem: I love to smoke. I enjoy it. I don’t care if my clothes smell like smoke. They smell ok to me. My doctors don’t know that I smoke. I lied and told them I quit a year ago, or a month ago, whatever works. I say my husband still smokes, if they ask me why my clothes smell like smoke. Even my pulmonologist, who is working hard to figure out why I’m so short of breath despite my lungs being healthy, doesn’t know I smoke.
I’ve decided to make some changes in my life, big changes, actually. I turn fifty in February and my forties haven’t been very good to me. I’ve been in the hospital three times with respiratory failure. I’ve gained over 100 pounds. I never exercised, or walked. I get short of breath climbing the steps of our house to the second floor. Because my doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong, they want to wait and see what will happen when I lose weight. So I started on Nutrisystem, and so far I’ve lost thirty-six pounds. I hate being overweight. My doctors have sympathy for my weight, since I’m on twenty miligrams of prednisone a day for Lupus. My rheumatologist is determined to get me off prednisone, which is ok with me. He says once I’m off prednisone, I’ll lose weight easily. We’ll see.
