to smoke...?

[rdmommy]

i have always smoked except when pregnant and breast feeding. I don't smoke around my dc and only after they have gone for a nap and after they have gone to bed. I smoke outside in the garden.

I really feel like an unfit mother in the eyes of some mumsnetters!

How can you not think that passive smoking is harmful? There are some things that you need science to tell you. There are others that are blindingly obvious to any idiot. Sitting in a room/car/whatever filled with someone else's smoke cannot in any way not be harmful.

Smoke, don't smoke, as long as you're not round me or my children I don't give a toss what you do. But please don't try to justify it, it's pitiful. If you quaff a bottle of wine or eat a dozen burgers every night, I won't get fat or drunk if I sit next to you while you do it. But I do smoke your fags.

Of course it doesn't make you an unfit mother but it does make you unfit in health terms. It's not just lung cancer, but other cancers - throat, tongue cancers ( I have seen amiddle aged woman lose her tongue to cancer) - and chronic ill health in middle aged people - due to COPD/emphysema - being unable to turn over in bed without being out of breathe - all those things put me off.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9776409?dopt=Abstract

Supposedly the largest study done on childhood exposure to smoke.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9776409?dopt=Abstract

If you don't feel like reading it, it found no association between childhood exposure and lung cancer risk and found weak association between exposure to workplace and spousal smoking.

YABU

Smoking is outrageously expensive, dangerous to your own health and puts the health of others at risk too.

Every cigarette is bad for you, moderate drinking can be beneficial. Not comparable.

1944girl- i understand you totally, my father died at 51 due to being an alcoholic, i don't have a good relationship with alcohol, i find smoking as something for me.

i repeat i have never smoked around my children, anyone elses children and i am ashamed to say even as a smoker i a judge the moms who smoke while pushing the pushchair.

the unfit mother question i made, basically stems from how it makes me feel, that i hide away, wouldn't dare let my mom friends know and i just don't know why i smoke apart from enjoying.

i started smoking again agin my 2nd dd2, because having two under 16months was hard work, not an excuse but it helped me get through each day knowing that when they were tucked up in bed i could enjoy a cigarette.

i understand the health risks, but i don't understand why they don't shock me into stopping.

The thing is, it's not like lung cancer just lops off 10 years of your life (or 20, or 30). It makes those final years of your life hell, for yourself, and for your family.

Yes, you might get some other kind of cancer along the way, but this is one you can actively prevent.

I do actually agree with those of you saying passive smoke isn't nearly the health threat people have made it out to be. The smoke coming off the burning cigarette, yes, but not the smoke being exhaled (all the tar etc has been filtered through the smoker's lungs). Shame it still smells like crap!

YANBU. But your neighbours will think you are a right chav as they spy on you through their net curtains.

i know, i've just thought that especially as i put my coat on over my dressing gown- god if they only knew i ate frozen pizza and tomato sauce for tea, i think i'd be booted out the cul de sac

RD they don't shock you because they're meaningless and have no immediate relevance, same reason I go over 70mph on the motorway!

Perhaps the day one of your dcs sees you or smells you will be enough, if will power alone is not. Many smokers do give up but their chances have come along and they've, with huge hard work, snatched it. I guess if you don't wnat to give up, you won't.

rdmommy : I'm not going to go on at you about how bad it is for you - you know that already!! (How do you afford it, BTW? I've never smoked (not even the teensiest drunken puff, and nothing illegal either - but I do like a drink or four so there! [hgrin])so I've often wondered how people manage!!)
Everyone in my family smoked so I've always been in the minority, so it was a relief to meet my husband and find he didn't smoke either!
I'm not the anti-smoking fascist I used to be (unless it's anywhere near my kids, then I AM)
so I think, because you are careful not to do it around your kids, YANBU.
However - what will you say to them when they are older and if you find out one of THEM has started smoking??
That presented an interesting conundrum for my Mum and Dad when they found out about my brother, I can tell you!
He gave up last September when his son was born, BTW.

It comes down to this - can you envisage your young teenage children standing over your coffin, their tears splashing on it, putting down their rose and having to physically tear their own hand away because they can't bear to let you go? Can you really wish that on your own children? Because that's what happened to me, that's the risk you take. That memory is ingrained in my head and will never, ever leave me. If you want them to be able to close their eyes and see your coffin as if it were yesterday, every single day of the rest of their lives then carry on, do.

rdmommy - you say that you know the health benefits but I don't think that you truly can unless you've watched someone close to you battling for years against a smoking related disease and eventually dying. This is not just about lung cancer and emphysema and heart attacks. Smoking increases your risks of head and neck cancer, cancers of the lining of your mouth, your tongue and your tonsils. Cancers which mean that you may lose the power of speech, cancers which mean that you have to have chunks of your tongue and jaw cut away, and slices of muscle taken from your back or your chest to cover the holes left. You may end up with a tracheostomy in your neck and someone will have to stick tubes down it to clear out the crap that you won't be able to cough up - it might be one of your children who has to do that. The tumour may eat through your carotid artery and you might bleed to death in front of your children. But while all of that is happening, you will be desperate to live, desperate to be well again, desperate to snatch every minute that you can with your kids becasue you won't want to leave them. But you will leave them. And it's because of the choices that you make.

Smoking doesn't make you an unfit mother. (unless you spend your money on fags not food).
It does make you a fool though. You know the risks you know the dangers. You are a mother and you still risk your life. You spend money on tobacco you could be spending on your family, there's a very good chance you smell of cigarettes, you'll probably end up with orange fingers and manky teeth. There's a high probability you will end up with lung cancer and your children have to watch you die. All for a tobacco fix.

Well, sorry to be a bit pedantic, but you aren't actually that likely to get lung cancer and die, even as a smoker. It's about one in twenty smokers that get it, which is much much more than non-smokers, but still quite rare. I think trying to scare people with the lung cancer stuff doesn't really work, as most smokers know other smokers who never got lung cancer and this gives them false reassurance.

Smoking does, however, massively increase your risk of prematurely dying of a heart attack (yes, you are three times more likely to die of a heart attack than of breast cancer as a woman) or stroke. Or being disabled by them.

Basically, it's a one in two chance of dying younger. So you could toss a coin and hope you are in the lucky 50%.

I heard a smoker say today, well, I'd rather die at 75 than be ill and live til I was 80. She kind of missed the point. One in four smokers will lose 20 extra years of life or more. That's dying at 60 rather than 80.

I don't think you are a bad person for smoking, just that it's better to know the information and then you can make a decision. I don't think guilting you into it will work, you kind of either want to quit or you don't, so wait til you do, then do it.

I just did a lung cancer predictor tool on NYC's Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center website and it seems that a 50 yo woman who has smoked 20 cigarettes a day for 35 years has a less than 1% of being diagnosed with a lung cancer in the following 10 years.

Yes, I know, small consolation to those that do get it and there's lots of other diseases etc, but it is not a "high probability", is it?

I mean, comparing to breast cancer- what are our odds-1 in 8 women will get it?

Winny - I just used that tool to check my mum's risk. It wouldn't work, because the maximum number of cigarettes per day it recognises is 60, and at her worst (for a good 10 years) she was on 90 a day

Nobody has the right to judge you. Least of all me because I smoked for many horribly-addicted years. Of course you're being unreasonable to smoke - you know that already. Good luck if you decide to give up.

90

wow

erm, how is she doing?

YANBU - smoking is an addiction and very difficult for some people to give up. Have you tried accessing your local authority smoking cessation services? You are not doing your kids any physical harm but seeing you smoke will normalise smoking as an activity for them and greatly increase their chances of becoming smokers in the future which I'm sure you wouldn't want. I know it is difficult (ex-smoker myself) but do you think that you could try to quit for good? Don't think you will never smoke again - just think to yourself "i won't have a cigarette today".