Anyone else remember this?

[Boundava]

With the recent conversations about the Canadian wildfires and air quality; I had a flashback of (my Mom) driving to Children's Memorial Hospital for chemo when
I was a kid (late 80's to mid early 90') and not being able to see the skyline. Those infamous Ozone Action days...hard to find any pics other than this one.

However I remember not being able to see Sears Tower on a regular basis (it will always be Sears Tower to me) or the John Hancock center while driving into the city on I 94 listening to Q101 Murphy in the morning (sheesh, I am old )

 

[Uberhoust]

I remember in the 60s coming home from a day in the desert with my parents and looking at the yellow brown smog dome over greater LA. I was a bit younger then, but it was so thick one could look straight into the sun on some days. We also had smog alert days where you were supposed to stay indoors. At the time I thought the smog was normal. One of my earlier jobs was fighting forest fires, so I think I may be in line for some not so pleasant lung disease.

 

[OldFishKeeper]

I remember in the 60s coming home from a day in the desert with my parents and looking at the yellow brown smog dome over greater LA. I was a bit younger then, but it was so thick one could look straight into the sun on some days. We also had smog alert days where you were supposed to stay indoors. At the time I thought the smog was normal. One of my earlier jobs was fighting forest fires, so I think I may be in line for some not so pleasant lung disease.

I smoked too much and can confirm that lung disease is not pleasant. Now, where did I put that oxygen tank?

 

[OldFishKeeper]

I smoked too much and can confirm that lung disease is not pleasant. Now, where did I put that oxygen tank?

Hey, Gary E. Don't be sad, at least I am still around and trying to convince anyone not to smoke anything...!

 

[GaryE]

I'll hit sad anyway. I'm glad you're here! Taking up smoking was one of my dumber ideas, way back when, but I seem to have stopped in time not to do any major damage. With asthma, it doesn't take a whole lot of smoke to get me coughing these days though. I've breathed in steel dust and all kinds of wonderful things on this journey.

When I was growing up, we had rivers in worse shape around my town than they are now. Controls over fertilizers and cows along the banks upstream went a long way, but some of the fish I caught as a kid had weird growths. Maybe from pesticides? I don't know, but environmental regulation really helped recover some waterways. They aren't as bad now, and some of the previously worst stretches now allow swimming.

I had a girlfriend who grew up beside an open pit asbestos mine. We'd visit her family and skip rocks at the lake - rocks with fibres sticking out of them. All the old miners on the verandas would rumble like bullfrogs and swear asbestos was harmless and no one ever got sick from it.

Smog was also bad. I remember the hazes, though we didn't seem to get what the US cities had going. My little city now has the flames of Mordor over at the refinery, and a pulp mill that lays down a wall of fart downwind of it - luckily very rarely heading our way. The sunrise showed wood smoke this morning.

This new wildfire smoke season is a wrinkle. A lot of people in the north have lost their homes. Here's to the gutsy fire crews out fighting this chronic disaster. Along the coast here, it's greener than last summer, and we're expecting solid rain coming in tonight and all day tomorrow. This is good. The 'dry look' can be another bad seventies memory.

 

[anewbie]

I tried smoking once when i was 4 or 5 and that once was enough for a life time

No my parents have not heard this story and i see no reason to break it to them now so shsssssssss.....

 

[TwoTankAmin]

It looks like we might need to start an Old Wheezers group here. In the early 60s if one could put the money on the counter, you could buy cigarettes. I bought my first pack in 1962 or 63. 47+ years later I finally managed to quit on Thanksgiving night. My reward was COPD.

I remember air in NYC you could almost cut with knife.

What is truly nuts is that I recently started on a new medicine for COPD. It is inhaled twice a day via a nebulizer (basically, a big air pump). I get my drugs in 90 day supplies. This new med is covered for me by Medicare Part B. I just got the statement showing the cost for the med and how much medicare and then my supplemental insurance pay.

Charge for a mouthpiece for my nebulizer: $35.00
The Medicare approved approved amount: $13.42
The amount that Medicare will actually pay:$10.53
Amount that Supplemental Insurance pays: $ 2.68

Charged for the medication for 3 months : $31,860.00
The Medicare approved approved amount: $ 9,381.06
The amount that Medicare will actually pay:$ 7,354.75
Amount that Supplemental Insurance pays: $ 1,876.21

All I pay are the premiums for Medicare and my Supplemental Policy.

 

[OldFishKeeper]

During my smoking and fishing years, I came from British Columbia. They had some pristine fishing lakes but, sadly had mining towns that polluted some water ways. Red and pink water was a disgusting eye-sore.

My work relocated (exiled) me to California. With dammed rivers creating reservoirs, resident trout could not spawn. Salmon could not migrate.

The Department of Fish and Game's answer was to create fish farms. Problem was, they crowded too many fish into close quarters. This resulted in disease and they overdosed antibiotics.

Trout coming from these farms had copods that made their skin ugly in certain conditions.

Back in BC, the coastal salt water farms infected the natural salmon and the antibiotics created a resistance. What a mess!

Here in California, I never buy farmed salmon. I also do not eat any trout that I have caught. In fact, I do not fish any longer. I just enjoy keeping tropical fish as natural as possible.

 

[OldFishKeeper]

It looks like we might need to start an Old Wheezers group here. In the early 60s if one could put the money on the counter, you could buy cigarettes. I bought my first pack in 1962 or 63. 47+ years later I finally managed to quit on Thanksgiving night. My reward was COPD.

I remember air in NYC you could almost cut with knife.

What is truly nuts is that I recently started on a new medicine for COPD. It is inhaled twice a day via a nebulizer (basically, a big air pump). I get my drugs in 90 day supplies. This new med is covered for me by Medicare Part B. I just got the statement showing the cost for the med and how much medicare and then my supplemental insurance pay.

Charge for a mouthpiece for my nebulizer: $35.00
The Medicare approved approved amount: $13.42
The amount that Medicare will actually pay:$10.53
Amount that Supplemental Insurance pays: $ 2.68

Charged for the medication for 3 months : $31,860.00
The Medicare approved approved amount: $ 9,381.06
The amount that Medicare will actually pay:$ 7,354.75
Amount that Supplemental Insurance pays: $ 1,876.21

All I pay are the premiums for Medicare and my Supplemental Policy.

Sounds just like me. On another forum I belonged to the GOF's...Grumpy Old Farts! I am still, proudly one of them

 

[bgarthe]

Yep……after decades of smoking a pipe, I quit just over 2 years ago. I do feel better and no longer have to find spots to smoke and no longer annoy my wife with needs for a quick smoke.

 

[GaryE]

I was lucky in that I only smoked from 16 to 33, and was a light smoker til my late twenties. I only had a short run of over a pack a day, sometimes two... This was incredibly stupid for a man who had barely survived childhood lung problems, but incredibly stupid somehow didn't seem so at the time.

I had my last smoke the night my first daughter was born.

True, I dabbled in the odd cigar for another long stretch, but I didn't inhale those. They probably still harmed my mouth and throat. I can sort of sing like Tom Waits. And even the rare cigars are long gone.

You know, when I think of things we don't miss along with old forms of pollution - the fur industry is one. I drove by a town that still has an old sign about the quality of its silver fox farms yesterday. The smell of mink and fox farms. I always found them disturbing, even if I come from a Newfoundland swiling family (you know, the baby seals on the ice? Yeah. Glad times changed).

I get to be an old guy because I dodged all the old industries that killed men in my family before the age I've reached now - not that old in terms of averages. I'm still under 70.

 

[plebian]

Charged for the medication for 3 months : $31,860.00

This is why big pharma is considered an excellent investment. It's also an indicator of how broken the American healthcare system is.

 

[Boundava]

Never smoked. Big deterrent was being diagnosed with ALL (acute lymphatic leukemia) at 10; I went through 5 surgeries (2 to put in Central lines/ 2 to to take out and 1 for a port in my head to directly access ,my spinal fluid), brutal chemo, radiation, multiple blood transfusions, isolation due to having low WBC, 5 bone marrow taps, 36 spinal taps, lost my hair twice due to the chemo/radiation (had thick straight dark blonde hair like my Mom's side, then came in briefly as black curly hair like my Dad's and finally as extremely fine/thin and sparse).

Another deterrent was my Dad smoking a pack a day and remembering doing spring cleaning and washing this horrible yellow film off the walls in the house and wondering; if the walls look like this what do our lungs look like?

Plus in my mid 20s and late 20s I got bronchitis, and in my early 30s I had walking pneumonia.

 

[OldFishKeeper]

Never smoked. Big deterrent was being diagnosed with ALL (acute lymphatic leukemia) at 10; I went through 5 surgeries (2 to put in Central lines/ 2 to to take out and 1 for a port in my head to directly access ,my spinal fluid), brutal chemo, radiation, multiple blood transfusions, isolation due to having low WBC, 5 bone marrow taps, 36 spinal taps, lost my hair twice due to the chemo/radiation (had thick straight dark blonde hair like my Mom's side, then came in briefly as black curly hair like my Dad's and finally as extremely fine/thin and sparse).

Another deterrent was my Dad smoking a pack a day and remembering doing spring cleaning and washing this horrible yellow film off the walls in the house and wondering; if the walls look like this what do our lungs look like?

Plus in my mid 20s and late 20s I got bronchitis, and in my early 30s I had walking pneumonia.

Congrats on your recovery! After smoking for 60 years, I got COPD then walking pneumonia followed by lung blood clots. In comparison to your experience, I got have light, even with my O2 tanks .

 

[Boundava]

Congrats on your recovery! After smoking for 60 years, I got COPD then walking pneumonia followed by lung blood clots. In comparison to your experience, I got have light, even with my O2 tanks .

Thank you. They kill everything to get rid of the cancer, then you look forward to the side effects for the rest of your life (lung issues and memory issues from the radiation, heart issues from the chemo...etc. and yet tbd)

Hopefully you are doing well, am assuming the clots are no longer an issue?

Got my Dad to stop smoking about 20 years ago. Instead he got hooked on the nicotine gum...