Bill B.'s Story: Smoking, Diabetes and What They Cost Him

Bill B. grew up in Michigan and was diagnosed with diabetes as an infant. At 15, a teenage friend offered him a cigarette, and he took it, wanting to seem as cool as his friends. It was a decision he came to regret bitterly, both for starting and for waiting so long to stop. His story is part of CDC's Tips From Former Smokers campaign.

Tips From Former Smokers: Bill B.'s memorial Tip ad. CDC.

Smoking and diabetes

Smoking makes diabetes harder to control, and Bill learned that the hard way. His doctors repeatedly told him to quit, and he did not listen.

By 37, his kidneys had failed. He needed dialysis for 12 hours every week to filter his blood as his kidneys once had, and smoking contributed to that and to the health problems that followed. He also lost the sight in his left eye to a detached retina, damage to the eye's inner lining.

"Then they took my leg"

In 2011, at 39, Bill's leg was amputated because of poor circulation made worse by smoking. He described waking after the surgery, reaching down for his leg and finding nothing there as the scariest thing of all. He quit smoking that day.

His life changed dramatically. He stayed active, but climbing stairs, playing sports and doing some things with his wife and four children became hard, and he worried about whether he could still provide for his family. By 40 he had also been through open-heart surgery. He came to see himself as living proof of why people should not smoke.

His message

Bill's own struggles made him determined to help others quit and to keep young people from starting. He said that if he were young again he would never smoke: it harms your health and your finances, does not make you look cool and does nothing for you. In a television ad for the campaign, he suggested that people who smoke list everything they would be willing to give up if they kept smoking. He also regretted the example he had set his children — it was embarrassing, he said, when his 5-year-old asked why he didn't quit — and was glad they had seen him stop.

Bill died of heart disease in 2014, at 42.

Help to quit

Free help is available by calling 1-800-QUIT-NOW (1-800-784-8669), or by texting QUITNOW to 333888.

Sources

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tips From Former Smokers, "Bill B.'s Story": https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/stories/bill.html
• Bill's own words are paraphrased here; the campaign's photographs and ads are not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
• The film is the agency's own low-resolution copy, recovered from the Internet Archive's record of cdc.gov.