lslydov

My name is Lesley (the registration on this site is weird and when I included my name with the vowel e it rejected it for some reason!) and I also get really bad physical reactions to cigarette smoke, similar to many of the symptoms described. I was constantly ill as a child, my mother smoked and still does, I only started to feel like a properly functioning human being when I moved out of my parents' home at about the age of 20! My early life I was a health wreck and it was a miserable round of chest infections and coughs with no respite and constant headache and sore throat, and all because my mum would not listen to me (I knew what it was that was making me so ill) and would not stop smoking in the house around me. Not many people, even on sites against smoking can really understand how smoke in the air can affect a person so badly because a lot of them are ex-smokers and not at all allergic but are anti-smoking from a different perspective. Any harm they have from it is self-inflicted, but they have concern and sympathy for one another's health problems, and although I have shown sympathy for ex-smokers' with health problems I get little understanding back. I've been accused of being a hypochondriac and mentally ill and all sorts by various people, and my breathing difficulty triggered by cigarette smoke has been described as an anxiety attack even when it went on for about 12 hours and I was in hospital with it, and I was left untreated and struggling to breathe all that time, I had to sit up all night to get my breath and cough to clear the phlegm. Even worse I was pregnant at the time so that made me extra sensitive to smoke and I believe that my baby was lucky not to be damaged, not once did they check my oxygen levels or do peak flow or any tests at all, total negligence really and I did not complain officially because it would have been a lot of extra stress I did not need. I was exhausted from just fighting to survive it! I truly thought I was going to die, but I fought hard to live through that night and felt a little better in the morning before they got a doctor to me. If I had had any strength I would have throttled the doctor when she said she could find no evidence that I had asthma or anything on my chest. I know it was real, the phlegm was there and the chest tightness, and the cough, only worse than usual. I don't know how I came through it without medication, I still believe something could have been done to help me.

I'm trying to link up with anyone else who has been damaged by their mother or father smoking around them as a child, or anyone else who is very allergic or sensitive to smoke, whether they had their childhood wrecked by a smoker or not, and I am looking for others in the UK like myself. I've even suffered insults on anti-smoking sites because I have said things people don't like such as my insistence that to smoke around children is a form of child abuse (in my case it affected me so badly it was probably as bad as a daily beating). Even a lot of ex-smokers still come across defensive when they are confronted on these sites with my experiences, so even though they hate smoking, they say I am too "anti-smoker" rather than just anti-smoking and are very unsupportive of me when an anti-smoking site is the place I should get the most support! Breathing smoke HURTS, and the human lung is not designed for it anyway!

I found this board while google searching for other people with a similar problem to my own, as there seem to be lots of specific anti-smoking sites as well as support groups for most allergies and sensitivities but nothing for people like us, and I cannot understand why that is, surely we are not that rare?
Maybe some of you can get back to me to start something together?

Lesley