Anti Smokers need to get a grip

Pet peeve time.

I read the stories in the paper and I hear them whine. I experience them treat me as a 3rd class citizen who is worthy of nothing but death or a life of exile. Funny thing is, if I quit smoking, I more than likely WILL die.

You can easily find stories about how bad smoking is, but how often do you read stories about the people it helps? Most people are totally unaware that for people with Colitis and a few with Crohn's Disease, smoking helps keep our disease less active and even in total remission for some. Now given the choice of consuming very addictive, dangerous drugs or smoking a cigarette to keep my gut calm, which do you really think I will choose first? For non smokers with IBD (Irritable Bowel Disease), doctors will have them try the patch and it has been known to help almost as much as smoking.

Before anyone goes off on me, let me explain. I have what is called a pardoxical reaction to most drugs, cigarettes included. If I gave you one of my Lortab 10's that I take for the pain, chances are you would get very tired and need to go lay down. I get the opposite reaction, they wake me up. If you took some benedryl to help you get to sleep, you'd get a great night's worth. If I take it, I will be climbing the walls and unable to sleep till it wears off.

The same goes for how cigarettes work in me for my Crohn's. Where most Crohnies are worse off from smoking, as opposed to those with Colitis who cigarettes help (as I explained above), my paradoxical reaction makes me get the same benefit those with Colitis get. The one time I did quit smoking, trying to pacify an ex boyfriend (notice the *ex*), is what started the flare from hell that has taken over the past 10 years of my life. I ended up having surgery and losing a little over a foot of my small bowel, had my uterus removed, had to have the wall of skin/muscle between my vaginal and anal cavities rebuilt and spent 4 years in a wheelchair due to being too weak and having too much pain to walk on my own.

Now tell me again that I shouldn't smoke. ==========~~~

I will give non smokers credit, they are making life as hard on smokers as possible. They bitch and whine until the taxes are raised higher and higher each year. So that leaves me in a spot where I have a choice, I can buy food or smokes .. I'll buy the smokes. I can handle hunger pains a lot easier than the gut pain I get from a bad Crohn's flare. Even though I do buy online, they still are expensive, especially when I'm on a very limited income.

Of course, having Crohn's means I don't absorb food normally, so I'm horribly underweight as it is. When I can't afford a lot of food, due to the ever increasing cost of cigarettes, they again are bringing me closer to my grave. Hey, works for me, if you can't get them to stop smoking, just make them die and be rid of them once and for all.

It's too bad that they have the media so wrapped up in their hands that the other side of smoking isn't ever told. I wish all those do-gooders could spend one day in my shoes. I have a feeling they would walk away from it with a total change of heart.

LC