I began smoking when I was 15 years old. Back in the day, smoking was a sign of being "grown up", of maturity, of being "with it". We all smoked. My parents, my sister, all of my friends, doctors, nurses, teachers, even professors smoked in the class room during lectures.
As the word began to leak out that smoking was a dangerous and deadly addiction, most of us, wrapped in the immortality of young adulthood, fended off the warnings with a firm belief that it just didn't apply to us.
We saw the photographs of black and shriveled lungs, but we were not short of breath, or coughing. Our blood pressure was well within normal range (mine, to this day, is 120 over 68), and we had no symptoms of heart problems. Indeed we all saw heart problems as a birth defect which we had escaped.
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