Lindsey Croaker (35) today told The Toon Lampoon that the UK’s anti-smoking culture has made hospital visits a tremendous emotional strain.
“I go in to see how the tumour on my lungs is responding to the treatment,” Lindsey told our reporter, “and the first thing that the doctor asks me is how many cigarettes I’ve smoked that day.”
“That sort of narrow-minded interrogation leaves me emotionally weakened, extremely depressed, even short of breath. I can’t imagine them ever asking that question to a non-smoking patient.”
Lindsey is a part of a both growing and shrinking (depending on chemotherapy effectiveness) group of individuals who believe that lung-nicotine content is no indication of a person’s health.
“The Healthy At Every Respiratory Stage organisation is committed to ensuring that smokers around the world are not made to feel embarrassed or ashamed of their body’s perfectly natural tendencies to grow cancerous tumours in their lung tissue,” explained the movement’s founder, Nicola O’Teen. “We see these incredibly harmful stereotypes being perpetuated of women walking, singing, taking in huge breaths of air, and we felt that we had to correct the record.”
The HAERS’s aims include replacing the current warning on cigarette packets with “Real Women Smoke”, creating a safe space within hospitals where smokers don’t need to feel threatened by statistics or X-rays, and renaming the existing four stages of cancer to “Real Woman”, ”Brave and Beautiful”, ”So Inspiring”, and ”Goddess”.
“I dream of a day when people will recognise that we smokers are just as healthy as them, and far healthier than those virtue-signalling preachers who inhale nothing but oxygen,” O’Teen concluded, from the Palliative Care Unit in the Royal Victoria Infirmary.
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons
The Toon Lampoon 