Cancer patients tell of the dangers of smoking
BY JENNIFER AMATO Staff Writer

NORTH BRUNSWICK — Tobacco kills more than 400,000 Americans each year, more than alcohol, heroin, homicide, car accidents and AIDS combined.

Each day, about 4,000 children under age 18 smoke for the first time, and more than 2,000 become new daily smokers.

One-quarter of 12- to 13-year-olds who smoke as few as two or three cigarettes per day become addicted in two weeks.

Every puff of a cigarette has more than 4,000 different chemicals, including ammonia, arsenic, cyanide, formaldehyde and carbon monoxide.

The tobacco industry spends over $11.22 billion a year and more than $30 million daily to attract new smokers and to keep current smokers smoking.

For these reasons, which were provided by the Speech & Audiology Department of the John F. Kennedy Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, Linwood Middle School participated in the Great American Smokeout, featuring an assembly with two laryngectomy patients on Nov. 18.

Joseph Totka, 65, of Hopelawn, tried his first cigarette at age 10 but became a regular smoker at age 25.

Patricia Thompson, 45, of Cranford, started smoking at age 12 and smoked right up until the day of her operation on Nov. 29, 2005. She said she smoked about 1.5 packs a day for 30 years.

She said her father was a heavy smoker, and that "I used to take his cigarettes, that's the way I started smoking."

Thompson said that she was prone to respiratory and bronchial infections, and she would constantly lose her voice at the end of her shift as a waitress. She finally went to an ear, nose and throat doctor who diagnosed her with cancer.

"I was kind of in shock, really. I was thinking, how was I going to go on if I had my voice box removed. How would I talk and work?" she said. "It was nobody's fault but my own, because I was the one who put the cigarette up to my lips and smoked it, so how could I blame the tobacco company?

Patricia Stuart-Shanes, a speech pathologist at JFK, showed the students how patients who have had their larynx removed communicate. She said an electrolarynx is an external device that vibrates against the neck or cheek. Esophageal speech allows the patient to take in air through their mouth and vibrate their food tube, almost like a burp. A prosthesis presses a filter that adds air to the food tube to enable speech.

"Right now my voice is not that good, but it's the best I can do," Totka said.

Stuart-Shanes also pointed out that their sense of smell is diminished, and that they cannot go swimming since water cannot get into the stoma, which is the hole left in the front of the neck due to the voice box removal.

The patients said they have never gotten anything stuck inside their stoma, but Stuart Shanes told of someone who was coughing out grass because they did not cover their neck while mowing the lawn. The patients eat, drink and vomit through their mouth because the feeding tube is intact, but they are unable to blow their nose anymore, and they cough out of the stoma.

Stuart-Shanes also spoke of the prolonged effects of smoking. She warned how a patient of hers died of lung cancer this year, even though he stopped smoking 20 years ago, and how dangerous secondhand smoke is.

"Don't even start," she cautioned.

"It's really not worth it, because down the road, you could possibly get a tumor or get a cyst that is malignant or cancerous," Thompson added.