Journal # 6

Here is another journal for class for Diane and Susan. It is an observation from Dublin and how it relates to health and healthcare.


Who would have thought that Dublin would have been a place that you would have run into more smokers than London? After spending 2 weeks in London I thought it was the 2nd smokiest city that I had been to, only to Paris. That was until I went to Dublin.

When we arrived in Dublin it seemed as though everyone from the twelve year old to the 98 year old on every street corner was lighting up. I am pretty sure that I managed to inhale enough second hand smoke in Dublin to last me a lifetime.

From a healthcare perspective I have to wonder if cancer rates, especially lung cancer are higher in the UK and Ireland than USA. I also think that this would be a hard thing to prove since the detection methods are different than those in the US. As far as I can tell from my observations I don’t see a lot of prevention being put into for smoking prevention or smoking cessation programs where in the US they are becoming more prevalent because we have begun to see more and more of what smoking does to the body and how hard it can be to stop lung cancer and even sometimes how hard it can be for the body to withstand the treatments that are needed for lung cancer if they will be successful.

With Oncology being my field of interest I have very strong feelings about this topic in particular because of what I have seen in the field. I have seen many people suffer because of what they have done to themselves in the years of smoking, and I have seen people suffer who have never smoked a day in their life. Treatment for cancer, while usually effective, is very harsh on the body and can be hard to see as a nurse. When you are giving someone a drug that you know they are probably going to have problems with you have to keep telling yourselves and them that there is a reason you are giving it to them and that there are proven results for the drug. When I see patients that have lung cancer, while I am still compassionate just as much as I am for all my patients it in some ways is harder on me because I know that some cancers, not all, can be avoided and its sad when you see those because it breaks your heart knowing that there is something that could have been done somewhere down the road to keep it from happening.


To make a long story short I feel as though smoking is way more prevalent in Europe than it is in the US for whatever reason and I would like to see if in correlation to that the cancer rates are higher. It hurts me to know that there is something that can be done that isn’t and that people are starting to smoke so young and continuing to smoke till so late in life. But in the end there are some habits you just can’t change.