In November 2007, I suffered a massive heart attack, also known as congestive heart failure. Google the term congestive heart failure so you can go ahead and know ahead of time what smoking can really do to you. Here’s what you really don’t realize when your smoking. Yea everyday, everybody tells you it’s bad for you, and you hear all the warnings that never stick. Just like me, all the warnings go in one ear and out the other. Deep inside you know it’s not good for you, but at this stage you don’t realize just how bad it really is. You keep thinking one day I really need to quit, but right now is just not a good time to take quitting smoking on as a goal. I will really look at quitting after I get that next promotion, or once I get my company running better whatever, now’s just not the time.
You don’t find out until it’s too late that the price for either not quitting or researching alternatives is just way too high for any person to experience. I spent eleven days completely under. I was being kept alive with fifteen tubes running through my body. I have a son that at the time was eighteen years old, and he had doctors telling him for two days that his dad at best had a twenty percent chance of living. My son had to see me lying in a hospital bed white as a sheep, skin and bones, slowly dying. This was a terrible experience for him considering that he and I have always been close, and had a very good father son relationship. I swear, there are days I break into tears just knowing what I put my son through.
Well eleven days later, I managed to pull out of it, and stay alive, but the problems were just beginning. I spent an additional two weeks hooked up to a ton of machines, so weak I was not even able to walk, get out of the hospital bed, bathe, nothing. I was essentially lying in a hospital bed disabled.
The day the doctor finally agreed I was well enough to leave the hospital, I asked the doctor about how long he thought it would take me to be well enough to try to get back to work. I have worked my whole life, owned a small mortgage business, and really wanted to get back to things and feel somewhat normal. That’s when reality hit me. The doctor said there is no go back to work. You are one hundred percent disabled. You will never be able to work again. That’s when I realized, this was huge. This was permanent damage. This was bad. I fell apart right there on the spot, and broke into tears. I have always been an extremely active man. I had always been heavy into weight lifting and body building outdoors fishing, hunting, canoeing you name it I was into anything active. I had even developed myself as an extremely talented musician.
Well now it looked as though I had essentially survived to live a life that was at best half as productive and active as before. After a bad heart attack like that, you lose about half of your energy, you are faced with painfully debilitating chronic fatigue, and you are never the same. They sent me out of the hospital in a wheel chair, and gave me a walker to use to get around the house with when I got home. Welcome to a living prison brought on by some stupid crap cigarettes I never ever needed in the first place. I’m still young in my early forties. These should absolutely be the best times of my life. Instead of living up to my potential, enjoying all the activities to the fullest extent I have always pursued, I am like a four cylinder engine that runs on three cylinders most of the time, and some days maybe two. No one ever told me that smoking could lead to congestive heart failure, and leave me essentially disabled.
I have always been an extremely strong person, and somehow managed to work my way back to being somewhat functional. My doctor says my level of recovery is a miracle. But even as far as I have gotten over the last few years, I’m still very much disabled in many ways. Before the heart attack, I could go trout fishing up in the mountains all day, many days just the drive up there leaves me to warn out now to even get out in the trout stream. At best I am able to actually perform true work duties maybe a few hours a day.
The chronic Fatigue has left me so out of balance and lethargic that I can no longer perform as a musician. I stay so short of breath now that my days of singing are gone for good. There are many days that literally I wake up and just feel dead all day. It’s awful. God what I wouldn’t do to have my good health back. I’m just not the same.
Ok, that’s all the rambling on about how bad this experience was for me. Please if not for your own sake then do it for your friends and family. Stop Smoking or look into the safe smoking method. I know you don’t know me, and probably my little story as short and convincing as I tried to make it has perhaps bored the crap out of you. But please, take just a moment, and think of how quickly your life can change on a dime for the absolute worse.
I mean literally, I was up studying for my real estate state broker’s exam, and felt some pains in my chest that kept getting worse until a friend called an ambulance. By the time the ambulance got to me, I was having severe chest pains, and the last thing I remembered was being flown over the city of Atlanta in an ambulance helicopter to Piedmont Hospital. That’s how fast things can go from a great life to the worst nightmare life any one human being should ever have to endure.
Please, it’s not too late. You can turn it all around. Whatever it takes, you have to protect your heart. Losing your health is just not worth it. Even now, all the medicines I have to take every day without insurance costs over three hundred dollars a month. No one has any idea what I would give to be able to go back even a few years, take a few simple steps, and have my health back.
Conventional Cigarette manufacturers should be shut down, and their executives past and present should be thrown in jail for life. Their products have, and will continue to kill people thru lung cancer, and heart disease.
If you smoke, heed the warning, if you don’t smoke, or know someone that does, please share this with them. If reading this makes one person wake up and look at a safe smoking method then great. If it’s just one more of the many whispers in a smokers ear that eventually leads them to find a smoking alternative, good.
Brent Thomason
Congestive Heart Failure Survivor.
Learn About Safe Smoking
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