Lung Cancer

I started smoking when I was 12 years old, back in the 60s, in fact back in the 50s, God am I that old, back in the 50s. It was just one of those things in those days, everybody did it. Like nowadays everybody doesn't do it, which is a darn good thing. And I walk along here seeing the kids around here who are all smoking and I thought you bloody fools, if only you knew. But trying to talk to them is like talking to a brick wall, they just don't want to know.

Did you smoke till quite recently?

I smoked up until let's see now, I think smoked up until three years ago when I actually went, I actually stopped, I went on Nicotinell patches and actually stopped smoking for a year and a half. And then I started smoking, but I was only, I was smoking roll-ups, I wasn't smoking normal cigarettes I was smoking roll-ups. But I must admit, and I shouldn't do it, I still have the occasional one now, it's only the occasional one though. I shouldn't do it but after 40 odd years it's a hard habit to break even though you've got all the tablets and all the wonderful things in the world to stop you from doing it.   

But that's what they reckoned caused it was smoking. But it could've been anything basically. I used to work you know with asbestos but I know it's not that because they would've picked that up on the bronchoscopy, they would've picked it up on that. I was in the Army so you know fumes, diesel, gasoline, the whole business, the whole schmuck all the way through, it could've been anything there that done that, something just triggered it. But they reckoned I'd had it for about nine years, but this was, this was just the, this was the top end of it, this was it saying enough is enough do something about it or the body do something about it.  

And as I said it was a shortage of breath that May trip. I'd come up those stairs and I thought what is wrong with me? I said "I've never been like this before." Of course I thought I had this viral infection in the throat. Well I put it down to, I put it down a certain amount to smoking, it must be. Smoking, the environment as well, diesel fumes, it's got to be something there.
 

Well it were upsetting. I've been in hospital quite a few times for different things, nothing as serious as that, and I have never been addressed in a way that I felt uncomfortable about something I'd done and he [the doctor] made me feel that I'd brought it all on myself. Since then being involved with, can I say Roy Castle Lung Foundation, and also my own support group and the Macmillan campaigners that basically lung cancer patients find themselves in the position where they feel that they've caused it all themselves. And where you know some cancers, people are very sympathetic towards, like ladies having breast cancer and it's very highly backed by the normal public you know, when it comes to charities and donations and what have you, lung cancer is like the bridesmaid, never a bride, you know it's like the poor relations of cancers. They don't get funding like other cancers get and probably that's because we feel that it's our fault. But at the end of the day it's not our fault it's the tobacco manufacturers' fault for putting the carcinogen in, sorry carcinogens in, in the first place.  

We [in our support group] all agree that there's other things other than smoking that can cause lung cancer you know like environment, like where I live there's a motorway over the road. Just over the bridge there used to be a chemical factory, all my life you know when I were a child growing up round here, and it were pumping thick yellow smoke out 24 hours a day. And unfortunately in this area there is quite a lot of people do get lung cancer you know, it's quite common. But you don't find that out until you've actually got it yourself, because nobody wants to talk about it so you know.

So you think the environment is also [to blame]?

Oh certainly yeah and along with everything you put in your mouth like stuff they they're putting on food to give it a longer shelf life, things that they're doing to make them all the same size and the same shape, all the chemicals that you get from that you know from that source. So yeah I think there's a lot of other things, why it's more rampant now than it's ever been before you know.