BEFORE YOU TAKE THAT PUFF

BEFORE YOU TAKE THAT PUFF

It was about a decade ago when after a prolonged Medical Biochemistry class I went out a bit fuzzy from imagining the complex structures of the numerous cycles we were taught and because I was striving to be a good student who reads daily, I needed to relax my nerves so I could sleep before reading. Now, as you can well imagine, with the buzzing of student activities, taking a rest that period was practically impossible so I decided to go out, away from the densely populated student zone to a more quiet part of the town and have some ‘relaxants.’

On that fateful day I called up my friend and after a short argument, we arrived at a decision on the right place to go. We went to the major part of the town where at the time one was sure to have chilled undiluted palm wine. Getting there was easy and we immediately ordered for a jar when we arrived.

It wasn’t long before the jar arrived and we poured and took a sip. But something was missing from our menu. It took a while before we got it…

A packet of cigarette.

I removed one stick and ignited it with a lighter, puffed very hard and raised my head to release the smoke when I saw him.

I was physically frozen for a moment when my eyes met him, doing exactly what I was doing! You can take a guess….

My amiable lecturer whom I loved so much, my mentor and one of the lecturers I looked up to and hoped to be like in the near future.

I was perplexed that he was just so close to me from the table he sat, alone on his table, sipping his palm wine and puffing away the smoke from his cigarette.

My friend looked at me and he could imagine my horror. He looked around and saw the cause of my heightened emotional state. He saw our lecturer as well. I presume his reflexes were far much faster than mine because what he did amazed me. At that moment our lecturer turned towards our direction and my friend immediately belied his action by holding the cigarette between his hand and the bottle and quenching the fire with the frost from the chilled glass.

We imagined our worst nightmare when our lecturer beckoned on us to approach his table. We thought we were finished and we were convinced we were about to receive the greatest spanking of our lives as we walked towards him. Any observer could imagine us as we quivered with fear.

However, our fear was misplaced because what he said after exchanging pleasantries with us came as a pleasant surprise at the time and helped to calm our nerves. His question was...

“What are the advantages of smoking?”

We thought about it for a while as our eyes rolled round the environment. I guess he saw that we had blacked out. We were still expecting a very long tongue lashing and chastisement on how we were dullards as we couldn’t answer his question when he told us to go get our glasses and join him in his table.

The lecture that day wasn’t so long but it stuck to my head as though it was impressed with glue.

He took us through the anatomy, physiology and biochemistry of the grey matter and the white matter of the brain (which I wouldn’t like to bore you here with) and ended with this conclusion: “Smoking enhances retentive memory.”

Your guess is as good as mine as to our reaction to his lecture. We increased the frequency with which we smoked.

BUT HE LIED… or should I say…. He did not tell us the whole truth. However, that also qualifies as telling us a lie. Our amiable lecturer and mentor never told us the other side of the story as per the side effects and adverse effects of smoking.

Have you ever wondered why so many medical students and medical personnel indulge in smoking? The reason stated above is one of them.

I started smoking at a pretty young age, no thanks to our secondary school guidance and counselor whose advice made us to re-enforce the bad behavior we had learnt in secret when we asked him about smoking the day we caught him indulging in the act. But the frequency increased when I lost my crush. The day she came to tell me she was travelling outside the country for her university education. I was emotionally devastated… but I came to realize that as I dragged in and puffed out the smoke, I was receiving emotional release… I was feeling better.

I hold myself responsible for that.

Now with all these good feeling of being “high” and taking back my emotional control and the added advantage of having a good retentive memory, why is it that smoking is discouraged?

How would you describe a person who will see a poison and deliberately take it in?

Look at the sole of the feet of a smoker… there are usually black patches therein which are formed by the gradual deposition of tars, nicotine and cyanide.

That is not convincing enough? Well…I don’t think any other thing will convince you. Perhaps you need to know that one stick of cigarette contains over 400 carcinogens including formaldehyde, ammonia, cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, hydrazine, lead, polonium and other numerous chemicals which I would rather not bore you with.

It is instructive to note that a good retentive memory is what any person can get without having to indulge in the poison of smoking. Let me teach you a trick, whenever you are choked with time and have a lot to read and limited time to do so, take condensed milk. It helps to improve retentive memory. And for emotional escape? Going out with friends, seeing a movie, playing a music or reading different blogs like you are reading one now is a good emotional escape for the broken hearted because whether we like it or not, the cause of our emotional upset will still persist after the “highness” has vanished.

Also, as mentors, we would be saving generations when we teach them the right thing and pass on the correct message.

Smoking is really dangerous to health, it destroys sperm cells and leads to male infertility, it causes lung diseases, lowers the immune system and causes frequent low grade headache… it also causes migraine, and for each advantage, there are over a thousand adverse effects.

Smoking is a bad habit which can be overcome and abandoned.  While it is difficult to break the habit, we must realize that just like every bad habit which can be dropped, all it takes is the emotional will to stop smoking. Before you take that puff, think of all the carcinogens that are in the stick, remember that you are taking in arsenic, cadmium and above all cyanide and that as you continue taking them in small bits, their concentration within the system keeps piling up till it will be big enough to tip the balance and cause different diseases.

Please don’t blame the people in your village when the symptoms of the disease start manifesting. It is also not the effects of your enemies who are at work. It is self- inflicted. But the goodnews is that it is not too late to drop the habit. Let us look for a black goat while it is yet day, the journey of a thousand miles as they say begins with a step.

Please think of these things before you take that puff.

Thank you.