Getting cancer for Christmas spurred woman to kick habit

It's just past noon Christmas Eve 2002, and Teri James isn't into the spirit of the occasion. The house is all merry and bright, but the colors have left the room, along with the air and every other thought except one: It's cancer.

"I don't remember thinking anything" after being told, James said this week. "I felt just like I did when I went sky-diving, right before I jumped. Except there was no thrill in the fear, just this kind of pit in my stomach, like I was falling and falling and no parachute."

James, who is featured with her family in a series of television spots as part of the state Department of Health's The TRUTH anti-smoking campaign, had for most of 30 years placated, put off and outright avoided her family's repeated pleas for her to quit. Now that their worst fear — and if truth be told, hers too — had come true, she couldn't help but face reality.

The motions of the season kept going, although the news brought to a sudden halt the ruse of telling the kids that she and her husband, Steve, were going Christmas shopping when they were actually heading to an MRI or CAT scan and ultimately the biopsy that confirmed the cancer.

"I'm a strong person, and I can handle the downs, even the big C," said James, now a two-time cancer survivor almost 54 years old and more than four years into remission. "But I had this little silly hope that it wasn't real. I mean, who gets cancer for Christmas, for heaven's sake?"

She didn't get cancer, she gave it to herself, she and her doctors believe, by forcing her lungs to filter out pounds of soot and tar that cigarette smoke had added to her breathing the previous 30 years.

The fact that they were ultra-lights didn't mitigate the damage nor lighten the load of her habit, which she stopped for three weeks once. But the combination of immediate vision problems, darkening outlook and the snail's pace of counting the minutes without a cigarette, she quit denying she was addicted and quit quitting for good — until an ultimatum from her son.

"Lincoln (her son) was out of the house and living on his own, and he came over to visit in October and said he wouldn't be back until I quit smoking," James said. "I tried to make it hurt my feelings, but the love and intent and courage to tell me hit me harder."

She absolutely committed to quitting on the following New Year's Day. And she kept smoking. She had no idea that her own body would provide its own ultimatum — a spot on her lung.