http://www.thevillagesdailysun.com/articles/2006/05/02/news/news01.txt
Smoking victim stays positive, shares his hope, faith
By GARY CORSAIR, DAILY SUN
FRUITLAND PARK — The little girl walks to the rear of the Fruitland Park Kingdom Hall and boldly approaches the gaunt man with the tube running into his nose from the oxygen tank at his side.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks with the innocence of a child.
Without pause, the man replies, “I smoked too many cigarettes.”
Not, “I’m sick.” Or, “I need this to breathe.” Rather, “I smoked too many cigarettes.”
No sugar-coating. No beating around the bush.
You learn to answer succinctly when the price of each breath is effort. You carefully weigh your words before speaking them when you need a machine to pump air into lungs withered from 30 years of two packs a day.
“I was already smoking when I moved here when I was 14. Had been for quite a while. Camel non-filters. As an adult, I smoked at least two packs a day,” said Cecil Sangster from the recliner that serves as the center of his universe.
He shares the recliner with chronic emphysema, which has been trying to kill lungs once used to sing country and western songs with a voice clear and strong. It was a voice that took him from Weirsdale to a Nashville recording studio, where he cut a single that went nowhere.
It was the voice he used to thunder, “Yes, sir,” when he was in the Air Force. The voice he used to sell mobile homes in Wildwood, clothes in Leesburg and furniture in Callahan.
Cecil hasn’t been able to work for 20 years.
The diagnosis
Of course, Cecil would have never touched a cigarette if he could have peeked into the future. But he was like millions of others who couldn’t foresee gasping for breath as a consequence of lighting up.
“I was 46 when I was first diagnosed with shortness of breath,” said Cecil. “They took me to a doctor in Tavares, and he said, ‘Man, you’ve got a bad case of emphysema.’”
So Cecil threw away his cigarettes, right? Not exactly.