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General : It was just too easy to quit View All Messages
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 Message 3 of 10 in Discussion 
From: Joel  in response to Message 2Sent: 12/15/2005 10:30 PM
I was looking for a detailed response I wrote a few weeks back from a new member at Freedom who was afraid that quitting smoking caused lung cancer. I can't put my finger on the exact post--but here are a few other comments I wrote that day:
 
From: Joel Sent: 11/27/2005 11:58 AM
There are lots of people who continue to use this "logic" as an excuse to reationalize smoking. Quitting smoking has never been linked to causing cancer. What was recognized in the past is that people who had recently quit were sometimes found to have cancer. This resulted in people seeing such examples to think that since the person found out that he or she had lung cancer after he or she had quit, then quitting must have caused the lung cancer. In all probability, the person had lung cancer already at the time he or she quit and just didn't know it. Usually, the size and stage of the lung cancer would bear this out.
 
Cancer of the lung is often present for quite some time, often multiple years before manifesting in a way to cause specific symptoms. Actually, by the time a growth in the lung is large enough to be caught on a standard chest x-ray, the cancer usually must have been growing for a few years in the individual.
 
I had always suspected in the past when I encountered people who had recently quit and then found out they had lung cancer--that one of the reasons they had quit was they were really starting to feel poorly and thought that it was not time to quit smoking to make things better. In the case like this though, the person probably waited too long. I am going to kick up a few posts that address these concerns. Hope they help you to see that you made a very wise choice to quit before you starting get such signals from your body, and the way to minimize your risks of ever having to with such a problem in the future is to continue to stick to your personal commitment to never take another puff.
 
Joel

Stop Smoking Recovery Timetable

  Within ...

You can expect ...

  • 20 minutes
 ... your blood pressure and pulse rate to return to normal.  The temperature of your hands and feet will also have returned to normal.
  • 8 hours
 ... your blood oxygen levels to have increased to normal limits and carbon monoxide levels to have dropped to normal.
  • 24 hours
 ...your risk of sudden heart attack to have substantially decreased.
  • 48 hours
 ... nerve endings to start regrowing and your sense of smell and taste to begin returning to normal.
  • 72 hours
 ... your entire body to test 100% nicotine-free with over 90% of all nicotine metabolites to have now passed through your urine.  You can also expect the symptoms of chemical withdrawal to have peaked in intensity.  Your bronchial tubes will begin relaxing and thus make breathing easier, and your lung capacity will also begin to increase.
  • 10 days to 2 weeks
 ... your body to have adjusted to the physical functioning without nicotine and the 3,500 particles and more than 500 gases present in each puff.
  • 3 weeks to 3 months
 ... your circulation to have improved substantially, for walking to have become easier, and your overall lung function to have shown an amazing increase of up to thirty percent.
  • 1 to 9 months
 ... any sinus congestion, fatigue, and shortness of breath to have decreased. Cilia have regrown in your lungs thereby increasing their ability to handle mucus, keep your lungs clean, and reduce infections. Your body's overall energy will have increased.
  • 1 year
 ... your excess risk of coronary heart disease to drop to less than half that of a smoker.
  • 5 years
 ... your risk of stroke is reduced to that of a nonsmoker at 5-15 years after quitting.
  • 10 years
 ... your risk of death from lung cancer to have decreased by almost half if you were an average smoker (one pack a day).  Your risk of cancer of the mouth, throat and esophagus is now half that of a smoker's.
  • 15 years
 ... your risk of coronary heart disease to now be that of a person who has never smoked. Your overall risk of death has returned to nearly that of a person who has never smoked.