Playing With Fire

About the Book

Playing With Fire is a unique book that explores current issues surrounding the epidemic of smoking among women. This is an extremely important topic today because for the first time in our history, young women are more likely than men to become smokers. Cancer of the lung is now one of the major causes of cancer deaths among women, and women now account for more than half the new cases of lung cancer each year. The future looks bleak, for it is predicted by the World Health Organization that deaths from lung cancer among women will double over the next twenty years. This is in addition to the loss optimum health due to smoking.

Playing With Fire helps to explain the reasons for the current pattern of smoking among women. It is the hypothesis of this book that while the lives of women have changed dramatically over the past quarter-century, the advances that women have made economically and socially have not made our world so much a better place, as a more stressful one. New roles and responsibilities are layered on top of the older, more traditional ones and consequently women are suffering the effects of burnout as never before. Cigarette smoking is an effective way of self-medicating to alleviate the pain and stress of our daily lives.

Playing With Fire is unique in that it takes a compassionate view of women who smoke and challenges them to explore deeper issues in their lives, something vitally important in long-term smoking cessation. The book validates women's experiences and provides them with a context for why they feel the way they do, which gives meaning to why they smoke. While supporting women in their personal choices--to smoke or not to smoke--it encourages them to seriously consider the risks involved and to consider ways of improving their situation and self-care practices.

The beauty of Playing With Fire is that it does not preach or scold, but rather takes readers on a journey of self-discovery that will help women to understand their lives and motives for smoking, as well as the possibility of personal change and power. It is a book that explores the creation of a better world through the individual's acceptance of and love for the self and the adoption of healthy self-care practices.

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.