To smoke or not to smoke? That is the question. 19th February 2012

To Smoke or not to smoke…That is the question?

For all intent purposes we will use my father for this blog.  He died from lung cancer in 1993. First question that many would be to ask, “Was he a smoker?” No. He was not. Did he ever smoke? Yes he did. He quit smoking 5 years before getting lung cancer.  See that is what his problem was. Wrong that is not how he got his cancer. My father had contracted Squamous Cell Carcinoma. According to MD Anderson (University of Texas Cancer Center Fact sheet 2012) “Lung Metastases; Cancer found in the lungs is sometimes another type of cancer that started somewhere else in the body and spread, or metastasized to the lungs. These tumors are called lung metastases, and they are not the same as lung cancer. They usually are the primary, or original, type of cancer.” (http://www.mdanderson.org/patient-and-cancer-information/index.html?cmpid=google_branded_ppc&gclid=CKGx9Kblqa4CFSleTAod4DWBSw)

You see my father had this huge mole on his chest that was always flesh color. One day I noticed it as turning black when he was outside working. He and I talked about going and getting it checked. He never did. During the early 50s just before many of our troops went to Korea, my father was involved in a cleanup in Washington State of “unknown test substances.”  In about 1986, my father also sold and changed a tire of two, to some Cuban dump truck drivers who were handling an unknown ecological clean up of some type of toxic materials just west of Sealy, Texas. The reason I remember this is because they were getting a tremendously large order of tires for this one specific job. In 1991, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer—unknown by the VA Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi. 

Years later after going over all of Dad’s records, before and after his death, I see that Dad died from a cancerous mole that spread into the lung then into the spine and brain. Meanwhile, my father’s cousin died (the age of 90) who smoked and drank her whole life. She died of “old age.”  Bottom line no matter what, when God takes you, you are gone.

The point I am trying to make sounds funny to a certain extent. “E-Cigarettes” the fashion of 2012! I started to investigate the E-Cigarette.  I looked at the websites below to get some information on them.  How many years has studies been done?

http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/  http://www.thesmartstyleliving.com/ereviewb.asp?source=bing  http://www.electroniccigarettereviewsite.net/   

http://ecigarettesusa.com/

http://www.elixirliquid.com/

http://www.insiderpages.com/b/15250593815/electronic-cigarettes-of-houston-katy

Is this the revolutionary “chic” method of smoking in the second decade of the new millennium?  Back in the 1960s, cigarette smoking was really marketed with some of the same information I had read on the websites mentioned above: words like “totally safe” “doesn’t seem to cause health issues” “acceptable indoors” (http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/tobacco-ads-1960s).   But wait, I have to ask how many independent studies have been done to see if these claims are true? Not near enough and yet as always, we good “ole’ American citizens” jump on the band wagon looking for a solution to something again. 

Use your brain. Lung Cancer can be caused also from living in an area prone to omit toxic chemicals in the air. We have EPA to take care of that. HAHAHAHA! According to the American Lung Association (http://www.lung.org/healthy-air/home/healthy-air-at-home/prevent-problems.html) cigarette smoking is not the number one cause of lung cancer in America today. It is RADON! Radon is a common radioactive gas found in nearly all soils. 

About 6 years ago, I had some x-rays done for a severe upper respiratory problem.  (No doubt caused from cigarette smoke.) Out of curiosity, I checked the box “NO” where asked do I smoke. Three days later the doctor called me and mailed me an x-ray report.  Lungs clear. In the doctor’s notation, “Glad to see you stopped smoking! See I told you your lungs would clear up fine.”  I stopped smoking about 2 hours before the x-rays. DAH! According to medical research, this is “likely” to cause that.

CURE:

Do not go hog wild and over use anything.  Stop doing everything that is not natural. No more living in houses, no more smoking anything manufactured. Only eat organically grown foods – laced with horse pooh because cow and chicken pooh has too much wrong with it. I understand bat pooh is the better of all of it.  But if you have to squat in the woods or behind a bush somewhere, make sure when you wipe it is not a leaf from poison ivy. (That hurts in the long run—painful too!)

But whether or not you smoke, know the dangers. When a doctor tells you the benefits outweigh the dangers…I am sure many patients who have ended up wanting to kill themselves while taking Chantix didn’t read the side effects label.  But be informed regardless that not all side effects are reported and you should consult your physician. He or she doesn’t know either. Call the pharmacist, who doesn’t know what side effects were not reported. Why don’t they know? Simple, it wasn’t reported.    

***I decided to use Julia’s method of source citing for this paper! I am boycotting MLA, APA, and XYZ.***(until I start my masters program.) 

In Search!

As long as I can remember, my father often commented every 2 to 3 years that you can never go back. We can reflect, remember fondly, look to where we have been to see where we are going, but we can never go back. Oh, how true that statement really was. One minute ago it was history. Unfortunately my father never took his own advice. Mother and he were looking for something from the past that gave them a remember of “wonderful encounters”; this is why we often moved about every 2 to 3 years from
Houston, Texas back to Mississippi or Alabama--in search of “something.” [Fast forward to 2011] I moved to Houston, Texas from ten years in North Carolina because (a) I was financially broke and in financial trouble, and (b) to further my education. Houston is and will always be a town to revitalize in as far as I was concerned. One day I went in search of Mickey.

Houston was where I grew up at. Although, I attended high school for three years at my mother’s alma mater, Murphy High School, in Mobile, Alabama, my impressionable years were in Houston, Texas. At the very beginning, of my senior year, my father decided he was not making enough money to support his family and moved the three of us, mother, himself, and me.  My two (much okder) brothers were own their own. I was not a happy camper about this and just recently (in the last 10 years) forgave my deceased father on this issue.  

Did I make an emotional mistake? Yes and no but I learned that I am a dinosaur and no longer fit in this town. Within two weeks, I had my daughter drive me down Airline Drive. Hundreds of ghost came up out of the streets. The first thing that I recognized was Cunningham’s pharmacy. In the past 90 days, I finally worked up the nerve to stop and go inside to take a look. Clyde was no longer the pharmacists; the restaurant was gone—the owners turned ½ the pharmacy into a doctor’s office.  All the wonderful “find everything” stock was no longer. There wasn’t a front counter. The original Pac-Man video machine was gone. I turned and walked away. Sitting in the car with my daughter, the Burkhalter brothers were scattered to the wind, the police no longer had their mid-night snack, and I felt as if I was in another time and Joe deceased. We all moved on.  

The next stop was to look at Peg O’Neal’s service station on the west corner of Little York and Airline. If Walls Could Talk there would have been many interesting stories that could have been told, including but not limited to– Virgie Hart and about her wild daughter (Anna Nicole Smith), Master Bates, practical jokes that of the early 80s police officers out of the North Shepherd Sub-station played on many, as well as some of my own secrets, not to mention my very best friends of the time--gone. If you have ever seen the Cheshire cat’s grin or the character, Deputy Dog – then you have seen Peg O’Neal. In 1980, many a criminal thought about robbing his gas station, but they thought again because of the .38 he kept under his jacket not to mention, Mr. O’Neal had the county contract to issue the sheriff’s office gas.

Grand-mother Auippa lived a block away from Peg O’Neal’s station. She was my best friend’s grand- mother. Pure Italian married to an Italian who had a nice Italian boy married to a “spit fire” Irish red-head who had my best friend and partner in crime. From another union of Daddy Roy’s he had a son. What attracted me so much to this family is their flavor—their zest for living a country/city life and being a rare “native” of Houston. For anyone who was anyone and lived in Houston in 1981, knew it was rare to find a native Houstonian due to a rash of in flux from the northern states—many industries has closed up north and people were looking for work. Along with this influx, came a mixture of undesirables as well with felony warrants circling their heads to make it a band writer’s paradise. I will tell you this about Grand-mother Auippa, when she said jump-- you asked how high and she had the “coolest” black and white photographs of men with machine guns, cars with running boards, and would always answer when asked,

 “Who are these men?”

“They are relations of my late husband. They all lived in Chicago.”

To this day, going to her house and walking through it, is like going back in time. The architectural structure and the 40-50s décor -- very priceless!

 I finally realized that life is forever changing. People will always be people, but the change is with ourselves and the evolution of the features in which we see. About a week or so later, I found myself with my daughter on Spencer Highway, in Pasadena, Texas. Before the Urban Cowboy, there was a really colorful honky tonk called “Gilley’s.” Down the road from it was “Johnnie Lee’s.” Over off of Interstate – 10 (on the north side of the east bound lanes), a way down past Uvalde on the out skirts of the city limits was a smaller place called “Charlie’s.” (It was more upper scale.) Those memories will always haunt me of fun. Fun, fun—fun, fun, fun! On February 4^th, we went in search of Gilley’s. As I was driving down Spencer Highway toward the east, I couldn’t find anything remotely resembling Johnnie Lee’s or Gilley’s. Of course Charlie’s is gone to the wind as well.

The Tele-Wink is still in my town—still thriving with old home cooking; the “old” Hobby Airport, the town of the delicate cock-tail, oil production, mink stoles, extreme high fashion and southern haughtiness is as gone as Lutheran High School on Winkler, Broadway Baptist School and the Gulf Gate Mall itself and many more.  I have been in search of Gilley who grew older and the building has been gone for more than 20 years. Try driving down Spencer Highway and asking, “Where is Johnnie Lee’s?”

The answer would be Johnnie Who? There are school buses on Sherwood Cryer’s dance floor. The image in my head is receiving a $20 bill bet for running through the dance floor, climbing on the stage and kissing the soft, sweet smelling, and smiling cheek of Mickey Gilley.