Kick the Habit

Most people know that smoking tobacco can cause lung cancer, but what they do not know is that it can cause many other cancers and illnesses. It is not enough to eat healthy and workout regularly, if you keep that bad habit then you are just limiting yourself from your full potential and performance. In our profession it is vital that we are able to perform at our peak when it counts, lives may depend on us and we need to take that into serious consideration every time we put a cigarette to our mouth. Diseases, moral, overall appearance, are just some of the things affected by smoking cigarettes. You not only hurt yourself when you smoke, you are hurting everyone else around you.

It is not enough just to talk about working out and eating healthy in the fire service, in some cases it is hard just to implement that into a firefighters routine. A firefighters life expectancy is already lower than that of a person that is not in the fire service, a smokers life expectancy is at least 8 years lower than that of a person that does not smoke. When you combine these two together you are just asking for an early grave. It is a proven fact that smokers die sooner than non-smokers, this results in thousands of dollars lost in social security taxes which inevitably ends up in the non smokers pocket. Cigarette tax is more money from the smoker to the non-smoker. A firefighters health is vital to his profession meaning that he is not able to afford to be ill while at work. On average smokers miss about seven days of work a year while the non-smoker only misses on average of four. That's over twenty-five percent of work a year that a smoker misses compared to a non-smoker. I don't know about anybody else but I would want a partner that I could depend on and be confident in when it comes down to crunch time.

Cardiovascular disease is the biggest disease leading to death as a result due to smoking. As we grow older our arteries harden up and we get cholesterol and other fat deposits clogging our arteries leaving them narrow or even blocked. Smoking accelerates this process rapidly and blood clots are two to four times more likely to form. Cardiovascular disease comes in many forms and they are more likely to occur to people who smoke regularly. Coronary thrombosis, Cerebral thrombosis, high blood pressure, kidney failure are just a few to name that arise as a result of smoking.

Compared to non-smokers, smokers are more likely to get cancer and that holds especially true with lung cancer. The same can be said about throat and mouth cancer, which hardly ever happen to non-smokers. Ninety percent of lung cancer cases are due to smoking and only .5 percent of people who have never touched a cigarette develop lung cancer. One in ten smokers will die of lung cancer and the numbers continue to grow as long as people start smoking at young ages and the deeper a person inhales the smoke. With all the smoke that a firefighter already inhales one can only wonder why one would want to smoke. Think about what a firefighter encounters during their normal job routine, it can range all from smoke to chemical spills to hazardous vapors to radiation. If you think about how rough this profession already is then why would someone want to make it even harder on themselves.

Asthma is also a common disease that smoking will trigger. When a person has asthma their air passages swell up and make it hard for a person to breathe. When a person who has asthma smokes it can only make it worse. The medication prescribed to asthma patients helps reduce the inflammation

in the lungs and make the air passages bigger so that oxygen may travel more freely.