This Is What Cigarettes Do To You, Warns Anti-Smoking Campaigner Hours Before Her Death

Main Category: Smoking / Quit Smoking
Article Date: 19 Dec 2007 - 4:00 PDT

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It would have been natural for Maureen Hamilton to have chosen a glamorous picture as the one by which she could be remembered.

Taken 22 years ago, the cool blonde smiles easily for the camera, confident in her beauty and her jet-set lifestyle.

Fast-forward two decades and the picture on the left reveals a very brave but broken woman, all the glitz and glamour pitilessly stripped away by the emphysema caused by her addiction to cigarettes.

It is this second haunting image that 58-year-old Mrs Hamilton was determined the world should remember as she campaigned to shock others into giving up tobacco before it is too late.

Speaking from her sick-bed hours before her death last week, the mother of two said: "When I was growing up, smoking was glamorous. Film stars would pose for the cameras with a cigarette in their hand.

"I remember buying a single cigarette from the shop for threepence, then smoking it at a cafe, hoping the boys would notice.

"I moved on to a pack of five, then ten, and when I started working it was 20, and I would smoke a pack a day. I didn't realise it at the time but I was a pretty, young woman.

"It's only later, when you look in a mirror at what is left and see a photo as you used to be, that you realise how things have changed.

"I don't want anyone to suffer like I am. It is unimaginable and the pain is so horrendous I have to take morphine every day."

Mrs Hamilton, a restaurant manager from Cambridge, lived a jet-set lifestyle as a young woman and was whisked to parties around the Mediterranean and Middle East.

The first warning shot over her health came in 1977, when she was 28.

She developed pneumonia on her way back from Israel and doctors advised her to go to a hospital that specialised in lung diseases.

She refused, saying she was scared.

Twenty years and countless cigarettes later, Mrs Hamilton collapsed and lost consciousness shortly after flying home from the Dominican Republic in 1997.

She was diagnosed with emphysema, an irreversible degenerative condition which makes breathing difficult as the lungs fill with fluid.

Doctors told her it had been developing for the best part of two decades.

She was to spend the rest of her life "shuffling from one room to another dragging an oxygen bottle with me".

Her last few years were a living hell in which she was kept alive on a ventilator while helpers spoon-fed her and cleared blockages from her airways with forceps.

She was moved to the Arthur Rank Hospice in Cambridge early last week.

Speaking earlier this year, she said: "I know giving up smoking is a struggle. But smokers don't see people in hospital hooked up to machines dying slow, painful, undignified deaths and they should.

"I hope my story can stop even one person smoking."

She arranged for posters of her to be used to highlight the damage smoking can cause and wanted children to visit her so that she could warn them of the dangers.

Amanda Sandford, of the anti-smoking group ASH, said yesterday: "I spoke to Maureen a couple of months ago. She was desperate to pass on her experience to try to prevent young people smoking.

"I hope her message lives on in some way. It would be a fitting tribute."

Mrs Hamilton's daughter Zoe, 41, said: "Mum was a tough cookie.

"She was a campaigner to the end and hoped her death would at least stop others from smoking."

http://www.ash.org.uk