Smoking hasn’t killed me, but it sure has fucked me up.

[T Pat]

The Doctors have been telling me I needed to stop smoking for years, I’ve had several lung function tests and always passed them with flying colors, so I always figured I could quit latter. I was diagnosed with peripheral artery disease (PAD) several years ago and told that smoking was the worst thing I could do, the Doctors even told me that my Johnson would eventually stop getting hard if I didn’t stop smoking (you would think that would have motivated me to stop).
In the last couple weeks I’ve been to the emergency room twice and had a angiogram, spent a couple days in the hospital the first time for what turned out to me being allergic to a new arthritis medicine my Doctor was trying out on me.
The Angiogram didn’t go well, they tried going in from my crotch and my left arm thinking they were going to fix me up with balloons and stints. My wife was talking to the surgeon and looked more out of it than I was when they wheeled me into the recovery room (he was telling her all about bypass surgery).
A couple days after the angiogram I was back in the Emergency Room with my throat so swollen up I thought I was going to suffocate or drown in my own saliva. Turns out I picked up a bad infection in one of the two hospitals I had been in.
I’ve been sitting on pins and needles waiting for the Vascular Surgeon to call (he said it would be about a week, 5 surgeons get together and decide on a plan of action). If they think I can last without stroking out, I’m putting the surgery off until after Vegas in July, if not I’ll be going under the knife this month.
So far we know they are going to cut me and gut me like a trout, replace my abdominal aorta with a teflon tube, shove my guts back in and sew me up. About 2 days in ICU, 7 to 10 days in the hospital, 6 to 8 weeks recovery time.
Today is day 7 of no smoking for me, I hope you smokers out there think of how fucking bad this is going to hurt when you spark one up, it was enough motivation for me