SOUNDING OFF:

I’m writing this letter as a promise I gave my father, Donald Lee Bayliss, as I watched him dying with Stage 4 lung cancer, unable to breathe, choking and suffering, going into cardiac arrest and passing away at 10:30 a.m. on April 5 at Hoag Hospital — one day before his 50th wedding anniversary.

Another meaningless victim of the tobacco companies.

My father went through two surgeries, countless chemotherapy treatments, trips to City of Hope, UCLA, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. My sister and I worked every day researching new treatments on the web and from every source possible, desperately trying to save our father.

My father started smoking when he was a teenager at a time when it was fashionable to smoke. Movie stars, teen idols and just about everybody was doing it, and they didn’t know about any ill effects to our health, as my father would say.

During my lifetime, I watched my father try to quit smoking many times once he learned of its ill effects because he loved us so much and wanted to be with us as long as God would allow him. He finally quit after being diagnosed with lung cancer two years before his death. I would like to see the tobacco companies held responsible for the wholesale slaughter they have continued and the millions of families they have affected like mine.

Nobody walks away from smoking unaffected. It kills those who smoke as well as those who are around them. Cigarettes should have been taken off the market 20 or 30 years ago. Drugs are pulled from the market every day when side effects are noted. What excuse could tobacco companies have except for greed and the power they have to continue killing and profiting from their victims?

I have kept my promise to my father now.

I’m sure my testimony will go unnoticed and that it will be business as usual for the tobacco companies, but at least I have said what I had to say.

God bless my father. What a great man he was, and what a loss to us all.

RICK LEE BAYLISS is a resident of Costa Mesa.