"Tips from Former Smokers" are NOT helping

Another pr abomination is permeating the airwaves. It is labeled "Tips from Former Smokers" and features "public service" notices by former smokers in the final stages of what are labeled as "smoking related" diseases.

These ads are GIVING ME NIGHTMARES. If anything, they make me want one more last drag on a cigarette before I expire from the hideous conditions they graphically describe!

I smoked cigarettes for 51 years before finally giving them up last September as the result of a major, severe, death-defying heart attack.

My heart disease is something I will live with for the rest of my life, whether it be measured in months, years or decades.

Cardio-vascular disease is scary. It can result in amputations, heart seizures, lots of very very bad stuff. It runs in one side of my family. Smoking probably makes it worse. But this sanctimonious ad campaign is hitting me personally at the ABSOLUTELY WRONG TIME!

I had a maternal great-aunt who never smoked a day in her life but who suffered from vascular disease and lost first her legs, then her arms, her mind and far later than she would have hoped her life! Every time I see the ads about vascular disease they remind me of her and make me wonder if this also is my future.

I had another great-aunt, another non-smoker, who lost control of her bowels and her bladder long before her mind faded. These insidious ads also remind me of her and her suffering.

I have no idea who the self-righteous, self-satisfied individual who made the final decision to use these ads was. But I wholeheartedly wish them to hell and back for the disgusting, painful and TOTALLY UNPRODUCTIVE suffering their precious sense of self-justification has caused innumerable persons who did not deserve this. You can take your "nanny" state and stick it up where the sun don't shine.