Because of the electronic wand, I assumed the man had cancer of the larynx. I also assumed, perhaps unfairly, that it was prompted by smoking. What shocked me, standing in that ice-cold garage, was my certainty that the same thing will not happen to me. It’s so queer how that works. Two months without a cigarette, and I’m convinced that all the damage has reversed itself. I might get Hodgkin’s disease or renal cell carcinoma, but not anything related to smoking. The way I see it, my lungs are like sweatshirts in a detergent commercial, the before and after so fundamentally different that they
...more
