Why would a smoker want to have bypass surgery (bypass surgery means surgery so blood can flow around a blockage in a main or in many main arteries) if s/he smokes? So the person can die of cancer later on? My cousin needed bypass surgery and he also had lung cancer from smoking. The doctors wanted him to immediately get a triple bypas (operation to make blood flow around three artery blockages in the chest), and then he could start chemo and radiation after he healed up. My cousin threw away his heart medications including his Nitrogycerin tablets so he could die with dignity. He had a massive heart attack a few weeks later and died in his daugher’s arms.
The doctors had tried to talk him into the bypass. But he had watched his brothers and his father all die of lung cancer after the doctors had taken out a lung in each of them and gone through chemo and radiation. I watched my husband’s father go through chemo and radiation for throat cancer, only to die later from the cancer.
Many times smokers have bypass surgery and then later on get terminal cancer. Which way would you rather die? Heart attack or cancer of the lungs, esophagus, mouth and/or tongue that spreads?
Bypass surgery should be for people who don’t constrict their arteries with smoke. This creates a back up and a need for the surgery again, way faster than for someone who doesn’t smoke. So by smoking, they constrict everything and create the problem way before they should have had the problem in the first place. Then by smoking afterward, they create blockages faster than a non-smoker and have to have the surgery redone faster. So if they want blood to flow better in their chests and throughout their bodies, they need to stop smoking. Even if they somehow pull a George Burns (man who smoked and lived to be 99 or 100 without getting cancer), they still need to quit smoking so the arteries won’t narrow and pick up plaque faster.
Smoking also robs the blood of oxygen and your heart, brain, and everything else needs oxygen. So while the doctors fix the blood flow, they can’t fix the damage to organs caused by lack of oxygen going to every organ in the body.
Obese people, if they can get their weight down, the operaton might be useful for them. But if they don’t, the fat pushing on their chests narrows arteries and the continued extra calories also causes them to reblock up way faster. Bypasses are only good for a certain amount of time in healthy individuals, but when a person is obese or a smoker, even less time. Many obese people can die if they sleep wrong because the extra weight cuts off their ability to do something if they get into the some positions that the rest off us can sleep in, they quit breathing, they can have chest pain from decreased blood flow and so on. How much more stress would bypass surgery put on them? Plus any operation on a person who is obese is riskier and more likely to cause death. More obese people don’t make it through operations than thinner people.
So for smokers, it may be a waste of time because they will probably die a worse death. For obese people, they’re still fat so it may not provide them with very good results (still have chest pain, sleeping problems, and still can’t move like other people who had the triple bypass if they manage to not die during the operation) after the bypass anyway.
