SMOKING AND ANGINA
If you don’t want to stop, and you have angina, then you may as well give this book away and put your affairs in order. If you continue to smoke, your chances of surviving for any length of time are reduced. No matter what else you do to protect your heart, it is being overwhelmed by your suicidal habit of smoking.
If you could invent something that in every way was guaranteed to give you angina and a heart attack, then smoking would be it. It reduces the oxygen levels in your blood, it narrows further your already narrowed coronary arteries, it poisons your heart muscle with carbon monoxide and your brain with nicotine, it makes your blood much more likely to clot, and it directly damages your most delicate blood vessels.
Yet I have known many patients who continue to smoke after a coronary bypass or a heart attack. I’m sure that they do not wish to kill themselves, but that is exactly what they are doing. It is so unfair to their families, and even to nonsmokers who are waiting for their own bypass operations, and who will benefit far more from the skill and devotion of their surgeons.
Smoking gives people a sallow, unhealthy look, and wrinkles. By the time they are forty, women smokers look ten years older than their nonsmoking counterparts. By the time they are sixty, many of them are already dead. Cancer of the lung and heart attacks, both of them directly due to smoking, cause far more early deaths in women than anything else.
Most smokers lit their first cigarette as teenagers, when they were far too immature to think about the long-term risk. If you are a non-smoker at twenty, it is odds on that you will remain so for the rest of your life. By this time, most people have learned sense!
If you have angina and still smoke, it is not too late to learn sense. To a doctor like myself, who has had to comfort so many families in which smoking has directly led to the deaths of men and women in their forties and fifties, it is frankly incredible that anyone should ever wish to light up a single cigarette. For a smoker who mulls over the facts about his or her habit, continuing to smoke means that cigarettes are worth more than life itself, yet 25 percent of the population continue to smoke them.
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