Eli5:why is an ex-smoker still at risk of having a stroke/heart attack if your blood pressure and bpm stabilizes after a couple days of non-smoking?
In: Biology
Both are caused by clots that build up over time, with smoking exacerbating how fast these clots form. But just because you aren’t smoking anymore doesn’t mean the clots you have elsewhere in your body are gone. All it takes is for a tiny piece to break off and then get stuck in your heart or brain, and that can happen at any time after a clot is formed.
If you stop playing football after 20 years of getting your head smashed, you probably wont get further brain damage, but youve already smashed your head for 20 years. Smoking is an act of destroying your lungs and putting them/your body under stressors, stopping is better than not, but youve already done damage.
Think of your body like a concrete wall holding back water. Everytime you smoke, it’s like someone hitting that wall with a sledge hammer. Every drag makes the hammer hit multiple times. Every hit makes a mark, a little bit of damage done. After you are done, the marks and damage remain. The longer and more intense you smoke, the more damage is done.
Now let’s say, after hitting that wall for the last time, a repairman is called. But he’s slow and inefficient because he has a bunch of other tasks to do. So he can only fix one hammer mark a day. It takes a very long time for him to repair all the damage done. At the same time working against him are the other factors we deal with in life – aging, stress, eating habits, sleep quality, environmental factors, etc. they too are slowing down the repairman, causing more damage and pushing on the wall from the other side.
How long can the repair man maintain an equilibrium of damage done vs damage repaired each day, let alone get a head of the damage, before the damage outpaces the repairs and the wall collapses?
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