FROM: The Charleston (WV) Sunday Gazette-Mail

*Also is several other local WV papers

DATE: January 02, 2005

http://sundaygazettemail.com/section/News/2005010133

Anti-smoking ads feature cancer victim

By The Associated Press

RAINELLE ― The woman made her point quickly, because she had little time.

"I have lung cancer," Janet Wells says. "They told me that I would die within a matter of a few months."

They were right, although they underestimated it by three months, giving the 42-year-old wife and mother nine months instead of six to tell her story in two matter-of-fact television ads warning of the dangers of smoking.

After learning that her cancer had spread to her spinal cord and brain, Wells sat down last February to tape several interviews for West Virginia's Division of Tobacco Prevention, funded by money paid by the tobacco industry through an agreement that settled lawsuits in 46 states.

"I hope some people, especially other mothers of young children, can come to understand just how deadly their smoking is," Wells says in one ad. "I didn't know lung cancer spread to your brain. I didn't know cigarette smoking would cause brain cancer. It does."

The first ads aired just before Wells died Nov. 24. Jean Tenney, regional coordinator with an anti-smoking group that persuaded Wells to do the spots, said broadcasting them during the election season was a struggle.

"We wanted these ads on," Tenney said. "We didn't want them to run after she died. But we were competing with all the political ads."

Wells said "it put her mind at ease" to find out that calls to the state's quit lines had surged by 40 percent after the ad aired in 21 eastern counties, Tenney said.

"I have four children," Wells said in another ad. "They range from age 4 to age 15. My oldest is trying to be strong, but it's hard when you see them break down and cry. Little Levi, the 7-year-old, has a hard time with it, it bothers him. He wakes up at night being sick, and talking about when mommy's not there.

"If I had never started smoking I don't think this would have ever happened."

Like many West Virginians, Wells began smoking in her early teens. According to state health department figures, 28.5 percent of high school teens in West Virginia smoke, and that continues through adulthood, with a 28.4 percent adult smoking rate that ranks fourth in the nation.

The department estimates smokers cost West Virginia $1.8 billion a year in health care and occupational costs and that more than one in five residents die each year due to a smoking-related illnesses.

Wells' husband, Dwight Wells, said their children never had reservations about the television ads.

"Their mommy was a very strong-willed person," he said. "It might have strengthened them in a way to know that she was doing something. She didn't want other people to be mommy-less.

"She was very frank about it. That's the way she was about it. The year before she passed away, she was calling the funeral homes to get the best price."

In the taped interviews, Wells discussed a future that she knew she would not get to experience.

"I've got projects that I never got around to, and need to get done. I can't do them now," she said. "I have a very long to-do list that that lung cancer has really fouled up in a big way."

Wells was a reading program coordinator at Rainelle Elementary School who also home-schooled her children. Now they attend a Christian school in town. Dwight Wells said he is struggling with his finances since the family income has dropped to what he earns as a school custodian and the $200-per-child payment provided monthly by Social Security.

Taking a break from sifting through stacks of accumulated bills, Wells pulled on his jacket and boots and headed out the back door, trudging through the snow, past his dogs, hens and goats.

Near the top of a hill on the 10-acre property, a small cross marks the spot where Janet Wells is buried.

"She wanted to have a view of the garden," he said.

Dwight Wells had arranged to borrow a backhoe, but it was broken when his wife died the day before Thanksgiving, and he didn't have the time to wait for it to be fixed.

So Wells and several friends dug the grave by hand.

The state is preparing to rebroadcast the ads in January to encourage New Year's resolutions, and plans to share the recordings with other states' anti-tobacco campaigns.

Janet Wells knew how hard it could be to persuade someone to break the habit.

She tried unsuccessfully to quit many times, before finally stopping along with her husband with the help of state-supplied nicotine patches ― but by then, it was too late. The cancer had taken hold.

"I know what it's like to be a smoker," she said, "and know how hard it is to quit."