Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 30, 1995 TAG: 9503310002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
My dad was a dark-complexioned man. He could fish for an hour on the first day of spring and come home looking like he'd spent a month at the beach.
But the rectangle on his back was darker than a tan, with an oddly smooth texture and an unnatural purplish cast that fascinated me - and grossed me out.
I remember tracing my fingers around its edge as I rubbed his back with smelly hospital lotion. The itching drove him crazy.
The year was 1983. I was 19 and a sophomore in college. My dad was 57 and dying of lung cancer.
Twelve years later, I still picture that rectangle - a radiation-treatment scar he carried with him to his grave - every time I see a person smoking cigarettes.
The woman in the car next to me, brushing her hair at the morning stoplight, a cigarette dangling from her lips.
The businessman at my favorite lunch spot, lighting up after he finishes his meal.
I tried to explain my repulsion one day last week as I sat in on a new smoking-cessation support group for Patrick High School teens. I tried to make a case to 16-year-old Margaret Corell, a hyptertensive diabetic who has smoked since she was 10, for giving up the nasty habit.
But unable to articulate the indelible scar, I stammered and stuttered, grasping for words. Finally I said, "Smoking. . . it just looks so. . . bad."
|n n| The top-floor girls' restroom in McQuilken Hall smells like a bar. Cigarette butts float in the toilet, ashes smear the floor.
And staffers say that's an improvement over two months ago. Smoking between classes got so bad last semester that hall principal Peter Wonson started locking the bathrooms between periods, "which is a bad solution but it works."
Wonson and other PH administrators decided to put some teeth into the district-wide no-smoking policy: Starting last month, students caught smoking or with cigarettes in their possession face an immediate one- to three-day suspension. Second offenders get a police citation and a $51 fine.
While Wonson believes many students have since curtailed school smoking, others have become amazingly perceptive at monitoring his whereabouts - to avoid getting caught. "Their radar is incredible," he says.
Nurse-practitioner Karin Musselman wanted to go beyond the punitive measures. Knowing that it's just as hard for nicotine-addicted teens to quit smoking as it is for adults, she offered them help.
Her support group, which meets at the school's teen-health center, provides counseling and tips for quitting, and is led by American Cancer Society volunteer Carol Kelley, herself an ex-smoker.
"It's frustrating because these tobacco companies target teens - Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man," Kelley says. The age requirement of 18 is "not enforced when the kids go to buy them, either. Vendors give no thought to checking IDs."
At last week's meeting, held a week after the group's official Quit Day, none of those attending had managed to quit entirely. But Danielle Lindstrom, a 17-year-old with bronchitis and asthma, had improved the most, tapering her daily consumption from a pack-and-a-half to four cigarettes.
"My lungs are cleaner and I can sleep better at night," she says. "But I still can't walk up a flight of stairs without losing my breath."
Because of her health problems, a doctor told her she had six months to live, she says - unless she quits smoking. She described her tar-stained lungs: "When I inhale, smoke doesn't come out . . . till an hour later. I've been coughing stuff up all weekend."
Musselman says she's noted an increase in teen smoking, especially among affluent whites.
Even her own 16-year-old has taken up the habit, she's pretty sure, "and it's driving me nuts. Most of his friends smoke, too, so it's hard to convince him to quit."
|n n| Margaret Corell, the diabetic with hypertension, reacted defensively to my comment about smokers.
She said nonsmokers treat smokers unfairly, that we think smokers look "trashy" and "stupid." She said I didn't understand how hard it was to quit.
And she was right. After the session, I apologized for sounding so judgmental. I knew as soon as the words came out of my mouth how mean-spirited and prejudiced I'd sounded.
I didn't explain to her that, while I've never been addicted myself, I know the pain of losing a parent who was. I didn't tell her about that purplish-brown rectangle on my dad's back, or how it felt at the funeral when I made myself touch his dead, cigarette-stained hand.
He felt cold and waxy, Margaret, like a candle. And it scared the hell out of me.
I wanted you to know.
Beth Macy is a features department staff writer and a Thursday columnist. For help quitting smoking, call the American Cancer Society at 344-8699.
by CNB