Danger of Smoking

Today's article about danger of smoking.

Every year, 6,600 teens in Louisiana start smoking. And one of every four students in high school is a regular smoker.

Now the doctors who care for seriously sick smokers are doing something about it.

Why would doctors bring young teenage girls to the morgue to see jars of organs, and to a heart cath lab to see a choked off blood vessel in a woman who smoked? Well, it all started in a classroom at Chabert Medical Center in Houma, where a lung doctor and tobacco educator are serious about how crippling and deadly smoking is.

"What I see every day, when I'm counseling patients and caring for patients in the ICU, in those latter stages of lung cancer and emphysema, is quality of life. So many of them say, 'If I would have known, if only I had known.' It's just devastating to hear someone say that after smoking 20, 30, 60 years," said Dr. Andrea Girod Espinoza, an LSU health pulmonologist and critical care specialist at Chabert.

The girls had to guess what rat and insect poison, acetone polish remover, moth balls, ammonia cleaner, car exhaust and tar all have in common. The answer later.

They saw how many cigarettes pile up in a year of a pack a day smoker, who spend nearly $2,000 a year. They got the feeling of damaged lungs by breathing through a tiny straw after doing jumping jacks.

One of the stops on the tour for the girls is the baby nursery, and one of the things they learned is that when a pregnant woman smokes, all the nicotine and chemicals cross through the placenta and get into the developing baby. In fact, for the rest of the child's life, all the way into adulthood, its brain and body will be affected.

They also learned about smoking and one of a teen's biggest fears.

"So there's a special kind of acne that's associated with smoking that we know about and it's actually harder to treat than normal acne," Dr. Espinoza explained.

So what will happen now to these girls when friends entice them to smoke?

"I'm going to try to convince them to not smoke either. I'm going to give them some facts about how smoking is bad for you," said 12-year old Haley Terrebonne.

"My favorite part was when we looked at the babies because they was [SIC] pretty," said Key Howard, a 14-year-old who has a friend who smokes.

"I learned a lot about the organs and how smoking is definitely not good for you and how it can really kill you and give you a bunch of different cancers," said 14-year-old Monique Hebert.

And that table of products contain the same chemicals as in cigarettes.

"The 4,000 is the number of chemicals that are in every puff of cigarette smoke that a smoker will take. Many of these have been proven to cause different types of cancer," said Wendy Theriot, a tobacco control initiative cessation specialist with LSU Health Sciences Center at Chabert Medical Center in Houma.