smokers: your ultimate smoking room?
 

Tell us about the smoking room you've always dreamed of. :winkwink:

"He Wanted You to Know"

http://www.sptimes.com/News/61599/Fl..._to_know.shtml

http://www.whyquit.com/whyquit/bed.jpg

On the day of Bryan's death, June 3, wife Bobbie and son Bryan keep a bedside vigil. The recent photo of father and son is on the bed. [Times photo: V. Jane Windsor]

Bryan Curtis started smoking at 13, never thinking that 20 years later it would kill him and leave a wife and children alone. In his last weeks, he set out with a message for young people.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Cigarette smoke hangs in the air in the room where Bryan Lee Curtis lies dying of lung cancer.

His head, bald from chemotherapy, lolls on a pillow. The bones of his cheeks and shoulders protrude under taut skin. His eyes are open, but he can no longer respond to his mother or his wife, Bobbie, who married him in a makeshift ceremony in this room three weeks ago after doctors said there was no hope.

In Bryan's emaciated hands, Bobbie has propped a photograph taken just two months ago. It shows a muscular and seemingly healthy Bryan holding his 2-year-old son, Bryan Jr. In the picture, he is 33. He turned 34 on May 10.

A pack of cigarettes and a lighter sit on a table near Bryan's bed in his mother's living room. Even though tobacco caused the cancer now eating through his lungs and liver, Bryan smoked until a week ago, when it became impossible.

Across the room, a 20-year-old nephew crushes out a cigarette in a large glass ashtray where the butt joins a dozen others. Bobbie Curtis says she'll try to stop after the funeral, but right now, it's just too difficult. Same for Bryan's mother, Louise Curtis.

"I just can't do it now," she says, although she hopes maybe she can after the funeral.

Bryan knew how hard it is to quit. But when he learned he would die because of his habit, he thought maybe he could persuade at least a few kids not to pick up that first cigarette. Maybe if they could see his sunken cheeks, how hard it was becoming to breathe, his shriveled b-ody, it might scare them enough.

So a man whose life was otherwise unremarkable set out in the last few weeks of his life with a mission.

http://www.whyquit.com/whyquit/bryanandson.jpg

Bryan Lee Curtis, then 33, holds son Bryan Jr., 2, in this March 29 photo. Curtis would die about two months later.

* * *
Bryan started when he was just 13, building up to more than two packs a day. He talked about quitting from time to time, but never seriously tried.

Plenty of time for that, he figured. Older people got cancer. Not people in their 30s, not people who worked in construction, as a roofer, as a mechanic.

He had no health insurance. But he was more worried about his mother, 57, who had smoked since she was 25.

"He would say, "Mom, don't worry about me. Worry about yourself. I'm healthy,' " Louise Curtis remembers. "You think this would happen later, when you're 60 or 70 years old, not when you're his age."

He knew, only a few days after he went to the hospital on April 2 with severe abdominal pain, how wrong he had been. He had oat cell lung cancer that had spread to his liver. He probably had not had it long. Also called small cell lung cancer, it's an aggressive killer that usually claims the lives of its victims within a few months.

While it seems unusual to the Curtis family, Dr. Jeffrey Paonessa, Bryan's oncologist, said he is seeing more lung cancer in young adults.

"We've seen lung cancer earlier and earlier because people are starting to smoke earlier and earlier," Paonessa said. Chemotherapy sometimes slows the process, but had little effect in Bryan's case, he said.

Bryan also knew, a few days after the diagnosis, that he wanted somehow to try to save at least one kid from the same fate. He sat down and talked with Bryan Jr. and his 9-year-old daughter, Amber, who already had been caught once with a cigarette. But he wanted to do more. Somehow, he had to get his story out.

When he still had some strength to leave the house, kids would stare.

"They'd come up and look at him because he looked so strange," Louise Curtis said. "He'd look at them and say, "This is what happens to you when you smoke.'

"The kids would say, "Oh, man. I can't believe it,' " Louise Curtis said.

In the last few weeks, Bryan's mother has been the agent for his mission to accomplish some good with the tragedy. She has called newspapers and radio and television stations, seeking someone willing to tell her son's story, willing to help give him the one thing he wanted before he died. Bryan never got to tell his story to the public. He spoke for the last time an hour before a visit from a Times reporter and photographer.

"I'm too skinny. I can't fight anymore," he whispered to his mother at 9 a.m. June 3. He died that day at 11:56 a.m., just nine weeks after the diagnosis.

Bryan Lee Curtis Sr. was buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in St. Petersburg on June 8, a rare cloudy day that threatened rain.

http://www.sptimes.com/News/61599/photos/flo-mom.jpg

At the funeral service at nearby Blount, Curry and Roel Funeral Home, Bryan's casket was open and 50 friends and relatives could see the devastating effects of the cancer.

Addiction is more powerful.

http://www.sptimes.com/News/61599/photos/flo-cig.jpg

As the graveside ritual ended, a handful of relatives backed away from the gathering, pulled out packs of cigarettes and lit up.

Yah OK ... what was that about never thinking?

My ultimate toke room is my car! Mobile, boomin tunes, big ashtrays, and it can re-circulate cabin air ... HOT BOX!!!

depressing

bummer but we are all gonna die somehow someway

So when are you going to post a pic & a sob story of how some fat fuck exploding while eating at McDonalds/trans fats!

How about someone with a hole in their liver because they consumed too much alcohol!

I find it pathetic the way people need to have governing body tell them what to do and not to, yet all gets pissed at the BIG BROTHER concept.

Seems no one wants to be accountable for his or her own actions:
- Did someone hold the thing to your mouth and force you to inhale!
- Brain defective thusly needing someone else to rule/guide you!

There is another useless thread regarding religion ... maybe you should make your way there for instructions.

Better yet, stay here and wait for the rest of the flock (Baaa) to gather so you all can GFY.

Let's stay on topic here,

Buncha loopy stoners can't pay attention for more than 5 min. . .

:1orglaugh

my dope smoking rooms always have reef tanks.. .

hot-boxing in the gondola... good times.

I am on topic. I had to verbally puke at the audacity of some posting crap to try to make someone feel bad or quite smoking.

Cool

Hot-boxing a VW bug before 1st period in high school..... mmmm.... nice times as well.

GANJ-DOLA!!!

Yes, but watch out when visiting Kicking Horse (Golden BC) ... the RCMP (oink) do spots checks: they hang around the top and before you can collect your gear they stick their heads in and if they smell dope ... they give you a free ride to the station.

Lowlife bastards!

Cool ... I box in my VW Golf (TD).

wow talk about a buzzkill.. .

Good thing is, BC supports it's kind ... STONERS and as I am open like a book this awesome lifty gave me a quick warning.

May have been my eyes ... or the smoke still rolling off my body.

:1orglaugh

I used to smoke 1 pack a day for almost 10 years.

I stopped smoking because of that article. I'm not telling you to stop if you don't want to stop. Go smoke 10 packs a day if you want.

Look I know what it is to be addicted to nicotine, I know how ex-smokers seem to be a threat to your addiction :Graucho

Just take a breath and everything will be fine.

:glugglug

Cheers.

say nigga that sig tight

you wanna holla at this?
http://www.weedland.com/pics/3.jpg

http://www.bigeasycigars.com/tourfla...CN0024_jpg.jpg

The Big Easy Cigar shop in Studio City, CA rocks!