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Message 2 of 41 in Discussion
From: GrumpyOMrsS (Gold) Sent: 12/20/2002 11:20 PM


Kelly,

Our thoughts, our prayers and our hopes that everything will be okay are with you, Kim and your family.

Your Freedom family

We know Kim will do everything she can to get through this. Being strong and courageous, is what she does best!

With prayers and lots of hope,

Joanne

Hugs to you both,
knowbutts

I am so sorry to hear what Kim and you all are going through here. I often allude to the concept of the pain and suffering caused by withdrawals are nothing if compared to the pain and suffering caused by smoking. I feel apprehensive when I say it to a person in their first few days of a quit who will think that I am being insensitive to the effects that he or she are feeling at the time, but I think if a person in the first days of a quit reads Kim's original story here and now the kind of trauma she is still going through, he or she will realize the real validity of that statement.

Your title here, "Too good to be true," bears some exploration. I suspect that you mean is it really too good to believe that a person can survive cancer. I think it is crucial for Kim and for your family to know that yes it is possible. I know a quite few people who were given very little hope of survival who are alive decades later. This is even true for some of my lung cancer clinic participants.

In the case of most of the other most common forms of cancer, they are often very treatable and curable. By that I mean the vast majority will survive the disease if it is caught early. Breast cancer, the number two cause of cancer deaths in women has about a 90% survival rate if caught localized. Colorectal cancer, the number two cause of cancer deaths in men also has a very high survival rate if caught this early. Lung cancer unfortunately has a survival rate that is just a little less than half if caught localized. The bigger problem is it is very difficult to quit earlier. If not caught early cancer is going to be much more difficult to treat effectively. But I need to emphasize here, much more difficult doesn't mean impossible even in metastasized tumors. It does often mean that much more aggressive strategies may have to be utilized and that you want the person to be strong enough to be able to tolerate the treatments.

In a sense, we still don't have a clear picture here of what is happening with Kim. We don't know for sure yet if the tumor Kim has is a spread of the cancer from the lung, nor if it is even cancer itself. It may not be a malignant tumor at all, although even non-malignant tumors can pose great risks depending on their location and growth. But again, everything is conjecture at this point in time.

Whatever the current problem is it is still crucial to recognize that Kim's not smoking is giving herself a greater chance of dealing with whatever she may now be facing treatment wise. You say Kim is a fighter and we know that to be true. We can see that in the spirits of her posts last time around. But even a great fighter wants the best weapons, tactics, and to be in the best physical shape they can be in when going into a battle of any kind. When it comes to the battle being treatment of a disease, one of the best edges a person ever has is that he or she does not smoke. No one here should ever lose sight of this fact.

I am going to attach two articles here that I have shared with Kim before, but that I still feel is important for her to recognize as well as everyone else reading here at Freedom. They talk about the importance of not smoking even in the face of such situations as Kim is now experiencing. So many people would say, "What is the difference if I smoke or not, I already have cancer." There is a difference though and it is a big one.

Also some people may read the title here of "Is it too good to be true," and think that it means that it doesn't make a difference if he or she quits or not. These articles makes it quite clear that not smoking does make a difference and no one should ever forget or minimize this fact.

Kim and your whole family have the thoughts and prayers of us all. We all want to help share our strength with her now, for Kim has helped serve as a great example of strength and courage for us all in the past. Kim is continuing to show us all that even in the worst of times, it is still important and possible to stick to the commitment to never take another puff!

Joel

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Quitting smoking key to fighting lung cancer

By DAVID WAHLBERG
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

ORLANDO -- Smokers who quit live longer than those who don't, even after a lung cancer diagnosis, a new study has found.

The study, presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, found that twice as many lung cancer patients were alive two and five years after diagnosis if they quit smoking, and many more nonsmokers also were disease-free.

The finding, by Greg Videtic of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, is significant because doctors often have a hard time convincing patients to give up cigarettes after learning they have lung cancer.

Patients feel the damage is already done, or they view smoking as a stress reliever to get them through the difficult news of learning they have cancer.

"Many people have a defeatist attitude," said Dr. Carl Tahn, an oncologist with Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute. "They think, 'I already have cancer, why shouldn't I keep smoking?' . . . Studies like this give them a reason to quit. It's never too late to quit."

Tahn said he encourages all his lung cancer patients to quit smoking but only about one-third do.

Dr. Paul Scheinberg, chief of pulmonary medicine at St. Joseph's Health System in Atlanta, said he has persuaded nearly 90 percent of his lung cancer patients to abandon cigarettes.

He tells them to think of smokes as cancer food.

"If patients want to keep feeding the cancer while trying to oppose it, the feeding will probably win," Scheinberg said. "They have to get in the mind-set that the cigarette is not their best friend, as they've been accustomed to. It's a betraying friend."

Donna Belmont-Lehr, 56, of Roswell was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2000. She had smoked for nearly 40 years and had quit three times only to start again. But Bemont-Lehr hasn't had a cigarette since two weeks after learning she had cancer. She shows no signs of recurrent cancer, and she credits nicotine patches, chewing gum, big bags of suckers and a new outlook on life for helping her quit.

"It was the reality of the fact that I wasn't infallible," she said. "I don't intend to go back to smoking, but I don't say I'll never have another cigarette. I just take it day by day."

Experts say quitting smoking allows lung tissues to get healthier and chemotherapy drugs to work more effectively while enabling patients to better withstand the side effects of chemotherapy.

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Post Operative Complications

Most people, when thinking of smoking risks only think of diseases directly caused by smoking. But smoking can play a major risk in treating diseases and injuries that in a true sense are not caused by or have anything to do with smoking. I am referring to the risk of postoperative complications.

Many doctors will hold off doing elective or non-essential surgeries for as long as possible in order to give a patient time to be totally smoke free. This is not a practice done for arbitrary reasons. Surgery is much riskier to perform on a smoker.

Your risks of complications of anesthesia or postoperative complications are much higher while you smoke. These complications can be serious, making you suffer much longer and possibly putting your life at risk. The longer you are off prior to surgery, the lower the risk becomes.

One cardiologist I worked with in smoking cessation programs over 25 years ago studied the risk of postoperative complications at the hospital where he was then chief of cardiology and thoracic surgery.

At that time he found that in non-smokers the postoperative complication rate was 1 in 50. Smokers had a rate of 1 in 3. If the surgeries were elective and they could wait for the patient to quit, he found that if the smoker would quit for just a week, the rates were 1 in 12. Of course it wasn't as good as a person who had been off for years but it was far superior to current smokers.

The longer people were off the closer the rate became to non-smokers levels. The important thing is to quit as far ahead of any procedure as soon as possible. The only way to get maximal benefit of longest-term cessation prior to any future surgery is to stay smoke free today and for as long as you live remember a day at a time to never take another puff!

Joel