“Either tonight or tomorrow, I’ll be dead.”
Those are just some of the final words of a Nova Scotia man who filmed a moving message warning others not to smoke as he lay dying in a hospital bed hooked up to machines.
On Monday, John Wiseman gasped his last breaths after a two-week stay in hospital. The 65-year-old man from New Minas, N.S. died from complications of smoking, according to his family.
“In his last few days, he discovered that he had an ulcer in his stomach that was bleeding,” Wiseman’s sister Sandra Wiseman-Burrell told CTV Atlantic on Friday. “They tried to do a couple surgeries on it, but the doctor had told us that his bowels, his small bowel was like mush, and they couldn’t even sew into it anymore.”
Wiseman-Burrell said her brother’s heart and lungs were also failing and he suffered from emphysema for some time.
“They couldn’t do anything more,” she said.
In an effort to discourage others from meeting a similar fate, Wiseman recorded a three-minute video from his hospital bed sharing his painful health experiences.
“I wish to hell nobody else starts smoking. You see all this stuff here. It’s all that’s keeping me alive right now,” Wiseman said. “I hope that anybody sees this, will remember what it’s like and will not start smoking.”
Wiseman’s sister said the video was important to him.
“If it just touched one person’s life, he would be happy that somebody stopped smoking or didn’t start smoking, but his message was ‘Please, don’t smoke. You’ll end up like me,’” she said.
Since Wiseman-Burrell uploaded the video to Facebook on Thursday, it has attracted more than 4,600 views. She echoed her brother’s message with an emotional plea of her own.
“Do whatever you have to do, but just quit smoking because your family doesn’t want to see you, like I saw my brother,” she said as her voice cracked.
