no smoke without fire..

so over the last three days i have -happily for you- not blogged through my cold but sat around and watched rubbish television with my duvet and felt generally sorry for myself.
i have been genuinely ill, and still am, although i am at work. this is a bad idea, not only for me because my head is throbbing and is verging on that sinus -ouch- thing where you want to shout at your head and tell it to fuck off for being so full of almost literal shit. it is also bad because i work surrounded by people who are poor and therefore probably of the low immune system variety, homeless people not often caught eating fruit, asylum seekers living on food vouchers probably not prioritising tubes of effervescent vitamin c in their £39 a week budget.
so i feel i am probably doing them a disservice.
but am here nonetheless
thing is, what has struck me over the last few days, is how badly i cope with pain on unhealth of any kind. we've always known i was a complete child when it comes to discomfort, but it strikes me that as someone who smokes, i am inviting pain upon myself.
this is obscenely stupid
as a somewhat flighty person (less so, as the years pass, i like to think..), i find it hard to think -in thirty years' time, i may well have a stroke- and take what possible precautions i may now while i have the chance. i have seen what strokes do to people, and it is vastly unpleasant. i saw my aunt, my godmother, mary, reduced for some time to the physical capacity of a baby and the mental understanding of a child, after that one horrible day. and even now she cannot do the crossword, or read books.....formerly two of her favourite pass times.
she smoked in the age when smoking wasn't really known to be all that bad for you. and then stopped. but even now she has what my mum insists on referring to as -a sedentary lifestyle-, which is precisely what you ought not to have if you wish to avoid a (second..) stroke.
i watched my grandmother collapse on Christmas morning last year. it turned out to be an angina attack, but at the time even the nurses among the haywards present thought it was much worse than that. her breathing over the last year has been reduced to puffs of air that look like a monumental effort to take it or let out. again, she smoked at a time when no photo was complete without cigarettes, shift dresses, gin somewhere and beautiful shoes.
i know what it does. they didn't, not really.