I've never smoked, and no one in my immediate family does either.
However, let me share with you a story. My grandfather was a heavy smoker throughout most of his life. He was a working-class man (a self-employed carpenter), and it was just the done thing in his day to take up smoking and be a man. He married an Irish girl, and started raising a family on the south coast of England.

Unfortunately he managed to catch quite a severe case of tuberculosis when my father was a small child, and although he recovered, his lungs were never really in stellar shape afterwards. He was strongly advised by his doctor to give up the cigarettes, and he did, for a little while, but he eventually fell back into old habits. Even though he was coughing and wheezing far worse than ever, he kept on puffing away, stubborn as he was. It all came to a head though, about 20 years ago when he managed to catch pneumonia.

My father will tell you that he managed to catch it because he walked to the cinema in the rain without an umbrella. However he caught it, it put him in a serious state. Being self employed, he put off seeing the doctor until the last minute, that last minute being the emergency room after being brought in on an ambulance. The combination of the scarring caused but the TB, the damage from the cigarettes and the devastation from the pneumonia meant that the only way the doctors had a hope of saving his life was by removing a fair part of his right lung.

When he awoke he was surrounded by his family. My aunt, who was about twelve at the time (he had 5 kids, she was the youngest) was crying her heart out. She made him promise that he would never touch a cigarette again, as the doctors had said if he kept at it he would likely never get to see her grow up. She was terrified that she would be left without a father at such a young age. He swore to her that he would never go near tobacco again, and he quit cold turkey. He never used patches and gum (not that he really had the money to spend on them), he just ended 30 odd years of smoking through willpower alone, and he was true to his word, he never touched a cigarette from then on until the day he died.

This happened a couple years before I was born. When I think back to my grandfather, I always remember him as a great man with a brilliant sense of humour who would always play with me, give me sweets and spare change, and would buy me fantastic toys. He died peacefully in his sleep (somewhat ironically of heart failure) when I was 6, and while I wish that I had had more time with him, I'm thankful that he had the willpower in the end to give up the cigarettes which would have no doubt shortened those already precious few years I had with him.

And he got to live to see his daughter grow up, he died shortly after her 21st birthday.
( Lightguy hail satan, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:50, Reply)