The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Like many smokers, Leroy Kehler never thought it could happen to him. But yesterday, speaking in a low, gravelly voice Ð the legacy of an operation to remove a cancerous growth from his throat Ð Kehler had a message for Parkdale School students: no one who lights up is invincible. "As long as I'm alive I'm going to talk to kids about what can happen to them," he told the open-eyed youngsters gathered in the gymnasium. "I don't want anybody walking this road at all. I don't want anybody to die, either." Kehler, a rink employee in Winnipeg, began his detrimental relationship with tobacco when he was just ten years old. "My little buddies and I thought it was cool and we did it to show off to the girls," he recalled. "Everybody seemed to be smoking back then. All the parents, everybody smoked. It was almost like a fashion statement." See 'Habit' P.# Con't from P.# By the tenth grade, Kehler had picked up a pack-a-day habit that would last for more than two decades. He was finally able to quit in the late 1980s after contracting double bronchial pneumonia. "I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but I couldn't inhale cigarettes anymore," he said. During the years that followed, Kehler had a suspicion that cigarettes had not levied the last of their damage. No matter how strongly he wanted to be wrong, he wasn't. In a three-month period in 2000, Kehler required both a tracheotomy Ð giving him a quarter-sized hole in his windpipe through which to breathe Ð and a laryngectomy, which removed cancer from his larynx and left him reliant on a prosthesis to speak. "Learning how to talk again was not an easy experience," he said, "and there were certain things I could no longer do. I can't go swimming, and I used to love swimming. I can't laugh and I can only play certain sports." Happy just to be alive, Kehler soon made it his mission to present himself as proof of the hazards of smoking, speaking candidly to hundreds of students across Manitoba. "Facts and figures sometimes don't mean much to kids," said Kehler following yesterday's presentation. "You tell them a true story about your own survival Ð especially the part where I literally died in the hospital and they revived me Ð and it seems to make more of an impact than all of the facts and the figures in the world." That's precisely why the NOR-MAN Regional Health Authority helped bring Kehler to the area this week to share his story at a handful of schools. "We find the kids really, really take in a lot of the information when they can actually see firsthand the effects of tobacco," said Jackie Harvey, smoking reduction coordinator for the health authority. "I do a lot of work in the schools, but it's nice to actually have a face that can speak from experience." Kehler speaks not just as a man whose body was invaded by tobacco-related illness, but also as someone whose parents and brother succumbed to the dangerous habit. "I watched my brother die of cancer," he soberly told the Parkdale students. Yet despite his personal tragedies, Kehler maintains a sense of humour. He's been known to joke that he won't argue with his wife for fear she'll stick a cork in his "stoma," the hole in his throat. Whatever his approach, Kehler just hopes he is able to reach impressionable young minds. "If I can get through to a few kids that already are smoking or are contemplating smoking, if my story makes any influence that they will not smoke, than I've done my job," he said.
