So Much Anger...

Last Sunday, incredulous about something I'd seen, I put this post up on Facebook:

Ironic sight of the day: two medical professionals smoking across the street from NYU Langone Medical Center. Printed on the back of their sweatshirts? Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery. 

Really?!

A friend suggested I re-post it on the hospital's website or Facebook page. It seemed like a good idea so I added a brief introduction and posted this:

This post is from my own FB timeline, but a friend suggested that I also post it here, so I have. It's not a reflection on the medical center, but rather an observation about two of its employees. Nothing more:

Ironic sight of the day: two medical professionals smoking across the street from NYU Langone Medical Center. Printed on the back of their sweatshirts? Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery.

Really?!

The next day I received an email from Facebook that someone named Edward Leung had commented on the post. I don't know Edward Leung, but what a bitter, angry person he must be to have felt the need to write this:

Reflection of the employees? Just because a person smokes a cigarette, doesn't mean they're bad people. There's a lot more bad people who DON'T smoke. So... Why don't you take your idiotic sight of the day and blow a f***ing grip, b**ch.

Thankfully by the time I opened the email and clicked on the post, the hospital's social media staff had removed it, leaving only this other, now-meaningless post from Mr. Leung:

The ret**rd is strong with this one.

Thanks, Mr. Leung, for the poignant reminder of how unbecoming anger -- most especially unwarranted anger -- can be.  

Up in Smoke?

www.cigarettesdigest.com

Is it my imagination or are young people—especially young women—lighting up more often these days?  My extremely random and very unscientific survey tells me that they are—on the street, in the nooks and crannies outside office buildings, under colorful bar and restaurant awnings and, I would surmise, inside their own homes and apartments.

Another, more reliable study conducted at Harvard and released recently links cigarettes to breast cancer.  Even those who dispute the study’s findings, including Delyth Morgan of Breakthrough Breast Cancer, a breast cancer charity in the United Kingdom, agree that “smoking is associated with lung cancer and other cancers, as well as heart disease, and we would strongly advise all women and men not to smoke," she says.

As I struggle with some tough decisions about how best to reduce my own significant lifetime risk of breast cancer—resulting from a genetic predisposition to the disease—I am particularly baffled by this trend.  So, ladies, please tell me, with all that we already know about the risks and dangers of smoking coupled with this latest study, whatever are you thinking?!?”