Romilly's story

I had always been a bit of a mummy’s girl, never wanting to lose her in a supermarket and dreading the evenings that she would head out without me to visit her friends. And so being told, aged 14, that I was about to lose her forever to an aggressive cancer that was probably due to a brief stint of smoking in her teenage years was like taking a bullet.

The pain that shot through my system when the words “it’s cancer” came out of her mouth will to this day stay with me as the single worst moment in my life. Although years have passed since the diagnosis, the sadness and pain that came with that news have not. I know that I, along with my brothers and sister, still miss her and will never quite understand smokers, as we all know the terrible damage they can bring to their future families.

Seeing my friends smoke always brings back a diluted version of that feeling.  Knowing that what they are doing could so easily mean that they and their children will go through the same pain that I, and many others who have lost a parent to cancer, did, makes the whole charade of smoking seem completely crazy, as most smokers realise.

The teenage population needs to find a new way to rebel.  Smoking has literally been done to death and, as too many have witnessed, its effects are far longer lasting and more devastating than other forms of rebellion.