so mad mad mad

I get mad when I feel powerless.

I'm furious with my mother tonight. We SMS a million times a day and she calls me all night long for random conversation, but she has the ability to drive me to the brink.

My mother is the quintessential 1950's wife transported to 2009, and with the addition of major attitude. I love her to the ends of the earth.

One thing I absolutely can't tolerate in any way shape or form is smoke. That's a tough one in a country where smoking is sadly still considered cool and where people still deny the relationship between smoking and heart disease and lung cancer and so on and so forth.

My last roomate would smoke so much that I would come home at night and my bed would smell like an ashtray. She denied that she was a smoker but we would find packages of cigarettes in the freezer, butts in the living room and the place stunk and hurt my lungs every time I slept. I never confronted her but my friends did.

My father went back to work but had a career change backwards recently. Post heart attack, for reasons I still don't comprehend, he went back to full time private practice law. His condition is iffy and I worry constantly, most especially tonight when I spoke with my Dad and found out that his new law office partner is a heavy smoker and despite the Canadian law against smoking in an office, he continues to do just that.

Smoking and Second hand smoke are equally toxic. My father has advanced coronary disease and needs every red blood cell to be free to carry oxygen not carbon monoxide. Second hand smoke even reduces cellular respiration at the level of the mitochondria drastically reducing exercise tolerance.

Second hand smoke speeds the development of atherosclerotic plaque in the coronary arteries which means blood can't get through and imagine this in a patient that already has over 98 percent blockage in three major arteries. In fact it's been shown that non smokers suffer greater effects from the smoke toxicity than smokers because it seems that smokers undergo morphological changes due to long term exposure to the toxins and carcinogens in the smoke.

Non smokers tend to have a geater sensitivity to even low doses of the toxic compounds. Recent studies in high impact medical journals have shown that that passive/second hand smoke causes heart disease at a 10 times higher rate on average in the U.S. than lung cancer, and heart disease is one of the top three leading causes of death in most developed countries.

I need my father exposed to this? My father who I would do anything for? My father who i've always wanted to be so much like?

How can my parents just quietly and meekly accept this? Why can't they speak up and do something? Why are they so hard to move towards any change, like durges floating in the wrong direction? Why do they never just stand up and fight?

I'm furious that they won't fight for something as important as life because they feel that if they ignore it it'll go away. Nothing goes away magically unless you deal with it.