Cat Poop and the Cause of Death

Published in the Idaho State Journal in September 2013.

It takes me longer than it should to distinguish left from right. I can’t tell time on an analog clock without audibly counting 5, 10, 15, 20, and I squint and rotate pages to decipher cursive writing. Although cursive usually eludes me, the scribbled in blanks on my dad’s death certificate couldn’t be more clear: “Bronchogenic Carcinoma” caused by “Cigarette Smoking.”

When I was born in 1972, my parents owned a bar and restaurant in Lava Hot Springs. Years working in the bar took its toll on my dad. Between the second hand smoke and the two-plus packs a day, his lungs didn’t stand a chance. As a small town bar owner, he didn’t have a corporate insurance plan, so he never went to the doctor.

In the spring of 1985 after being sick all winter, he finally made the trek to Pocatello to see a doctor. Dad’s lungs were such a mess they couldn’t begin to make a diagnosis, so he was sent to the Veteran’s hospital in Salt Lake.

The VA doctors diagnosed cancer in his left lung and emphysema in the other. When they went in to remove the cancerous one, the infection was so bad and untreated for so long that they had to chisel calcified pus away from his ribs to get the lung out. They sent him home with a drain tube sticking out of his chest.

My folks divorced in ’76, but maintained an amicable relationship, so he moved in with us so we could take care of him. Seventh grade was weird anyway, and it got weirder with my sick dad on the couch when I hadn’t lived with him for 10 years.

Toward the end of that school year, he deteriorated and had to return to Salt Lake. My mom did a masterful job of being honest about his impending death while incorporating some fun on our weekends to see him. One of the greatest gifts was learning so young that life is an unavoidable mixture of fun and tragedy. Gee, thanks, Mom and Dad and cigarette manufacturers.

I didn’t feel as sorry for him as I should because it was his choice to smoke. It was his choice to wither away in front of his kid and never get to see her high school years or know her as an adult. I wasn’t exactly angry at him because I grew up knowing him as a smoker. It was a part of him. When someone dies mountain climbing or in any extreme sport, we tell ourselves they died doing what they loved. Well, my dad loved a fresh cigarette, and so did my mom.

One of the reasons my mom chose a career in social work was because smoking was allowed in state buildings and cars in the 1960’s. She considered being an English teacher like my grandmother, but she couldn’t have smoked during the school day. I thought for sure after my dad died, she’d quit. Nope.

Mom was hospitalized with heart and lung problems my ninth grade year and the doctors asked her who I would live with when she died. Not “if”, but “when”. Finally, she was ready to try quitting.
She tried quitting cold turkey and failed. She tried Nicorette gum and failed. She joined a support group where the facilitator directed attendees to imagine the cigarette as something disgusting. Mom chose cat poop. It was her fierce visualization of putting cat poop between her fingers and smelling the odor as she brought it to her lips that led to her quitting.

Eventually her years of smoking tracked her down, too. After an emphysema diagnosis and five years on oxygen, I had to call an ambulance when she couldn’t catch her breath. I rode in the ambulance stunned. At the ER, I watched the doctors rush to intubate when her eyes rolled back and she started to arrest. As they corralled me out of the room, I remember thinking, “This needs to be an anti-smoking ad.”

Even though it killed my folks, I still support other people’s right and choice to smoke. Sure, I wish people would make different choices. I wish they could see Ebenezer Scrooge’s Ghost of Smoking Yet to Come in my parents’ deaths and draw resolve for the arsenal of weapons needed to fight this addiction. But I hesitate to be too vocal when it’s something that really doesn’t affect me. (Increased insurance costs due to smokers are a conversation for another day.)

Second hand smoke does affect me, however. I fully support the ISU smoking ban and the proposed city ban. A quote in this month’s Pocatello Magazine article “Smoke Free Idaho” by Sylvia Hernandez captures my sentiment the best. “Smoking is optional, whereas breathing is not.”