Playing With Fire: (Wisdom for Women Who Smoke)

Playing With Fire explores current issues surrounding the epidemic of smoking among women, viewing this as an understandable act of adaptation to modern life rather than a personal failing. The author strongly questions the appropriateness of current prejudicial attitudes toward people who smoke.

About the Author :
Betty Bryenton has worked as a registered nurse since 1975, practicing in various parts of her native Canada and Saudi Arabia. She's covered all aspects of nursing practice, from delivering a baby alone to cooking the Christmas turkey in a small community hospital. For the past twelve years she has focused on palliative care, working intimately with the end result of continued smoking. She has personally experienced the tragedy of lives prematurely ended by a largely preventable cause of death. Betty nursed in Vancouver at the height of the AIDS epidemic and helped many patients address end-of-life issues that one has to face when handed a premature death sentence. She has also worked in psychiatry, nursing women with eating disorders, as well as mood disorders, illnesses that have their origins in emotional pain. Betty also brings a twenty-year smoking history to this book, and a deep understanding of the allure of cigarettes. Unapologetically, and with great honesty and humor, she explores the twists and turns of her own tobacco addiction. She brings to this book not only a heart-felt compassion for smokers, but an intellectual passion for the subject. Betty understands both sides of the equation. While many experts on smoking have never smoked themselves and rarely associate with smokers, Betty fully understands average women and the forces in their lives that make nicotine such a source of comfort. As a single parent working in a largely female profession she has truly "been there." Having also participated in just about every self-improvement workshop known to humankind, she feels qualified to address the multitude of issues involved in improving our lives and, ultimately, our self-care practices. The author, as a nurse, begins as a companion in unearthing the issues that make women so susceptible to tobacco use and continues with them on a collaborative journey.