The Student Parking Lot

It hadn’t even been month since school started and I must have been looking for Gena and Leah to see what they were doing. I finally found them down on the student parking lot smoking. I walked up to them and asked why they didn’t tell me. They both said they were afraid I would be mad at them for smoking so had been doing it in secret. Yes I am a rule follower and a slight goody two shoes but I think I surprised them both by demanding a cigarette. This is how smoking during nursing school started. I would eventually quit after nursing school and then prn throughout the rest of my life. Gena finally quit in 2021 and my best guess is Leah quit after she left nursing school. However for the next year and a half we would smoke together and because it was 1985 we could smoke in the dorm. None of us (including my roommate) ever smoked in our rooms but we did smoke in our floor lounge. They had stopped selling cigarettes in the hospital gift shop but the gas station was only a short walk away. Actually the gas station is still on Hampton.

I had my first cigarette in fifth grade when my teen-age baby sitter Jenny gave me one of hers. I ended up vomiting and having a huge headache but I would smoke a cigarette every once in a while up until I started nursing school. My mom found out about my smoking because I left a letter from one of my high school friends laying around the house. In it he said he would quit drinking, if I quit smoking. He would eventually start smoking himself and also became an alcoholic. So if I play the comparison game, smoking prn is a much better option than drinking which I was never interested in.

Mole Moral ~ Pastor Tom always says, “you are who you hang with” and in nursing school we were a bunch of smokers because the stress was unbelievable.