The Fumble

It wasn’t that long ago, that I would eat my lunch in the teacher’s room with my friends under a haze of cigarette smoke.  At one point it was fashionable to hold a burning stick of tobacco between your fingers and now we know it to be deadly.  I never smoked.  I tried one night while I was doing my laundry in the basement of Dakin Hall.  I was alone. Beside the rumble of the dryer, I opened the pack and smelled the leaves rolled tightly.  I fumbled badly, felt awkward as I tried to manage too many things foreign at once-the cigarette, the lighter, the drawing in and exhaling.  At that time, the media was just beginning to divulge the dangers, while the tobacco lobbyist tried to reassure the consumer.  Fortunately for me, I just did not understand the allure.  Those few mismanaged puffs represented my first and last cigarette.

Not many years following this experimentation, I watched my uncle of just fifty years gasp his every breath.  And then twenty years later, my mother a medical abnormality (she had outlived the expected age of fifty years living into her seventies) was diagnosed with ALPHA-1.  This is a genetic medical condition in which the lining of the lungs can be irreversibly damaged because the body does not produce an enzyme that normally protects the lining of the lungs.  This condition can also damage the kidneys.

 For months, I slept on my mother’s floor on the weekends to care for her.  The condition had reduced her lung function. Clothes became simple and fairly loose for easy dressing and undressing..  By day, my mother rested on the couch.  Simple movements robbed her of her breath. Eating became difficult.  Stubborn, she did not want to give in to the condition.  Finally, the rehabilitation center not versed in the correct dosing of medication, over-dozed.  My mother quietly slipped away. 

Thankfully, our understanding has evolved.  When I was little the bowling alley was in a haze of smoke.  Tonight when we bowled, there were no little metal ashtrays attached to the scoring tables.  When I was little I would rub the ash out with my finger to make way for new ash.   This evening we bowled, we dined and we traveled home in the car all benefitting from our smoke-free experience.  I am grateful I never got hooked.  My mother would hate to see me suffer. Watching my mother anxiously take in breath after struggling breath now makes me thankful that I fumbled in the basement of Dakin Hall.