"But he could no longer keep up with his friends on the golf course and the slightest exertion left him breathless and tired," his widow said. He went on to develop severe bronchitis and never really felt well, retiring at 56. "He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do."īut although researchers have found that quitting often gives the body time to repair the damage of cigarette smoking, in his case apparently it came too late. Clark said that her husband gave up smoking because of health concerns. We weren't proud of it," she said in a telephone conversation from her Des Moines, Wash., home. Although the Clarks did not conceal his smoking, "we didn't go around broadcasting it. She has chosen this new role, she said, to help encourage young people not to start smoking. The bill would require rotating warning labels on cigarette packages as well as disclosure to the government of chemical additives in cigarettes. Clark is scheduled to testify on behalf of the American Lung Association on an anti-smoking education bill before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. Thursday, as a new recruit in the war on smoking, Mrs. She and her husband put the blame on a quarter century of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, a habit he acquired while serving as an Air Corps bombardier during World War II and which he gave up 12 years before his death. I was beginning to doubt very seriously at that point," she said. "I said, 'Honey, let's just hope that things will work out.' But I had the same fear. He told me, 'I need to be on a respirator.' Weeks before his death, while talking with his wife about going home, the retired dentist "mentioned that he didn't think his lungs would ever allow him to leave the hospital. The heart still was working, but his lungs and other deteriorated organs had given out. Clark recalled.Ĭlark died at 62 after 112 days with the world's first permanent artificial heart beating in his chest. In the weeks before his death on March 23 at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, "He said many times, 'I wish I hadn't smoked,' " Mrs. ![]() I think his doctors would agree with me," Una Loy Clark said in an interview. ![]() "I feel that his lungs more than any other thing had to do with his ultimate death. Clark probably would be living today with his artificial heart if he hadn't smoked for 25 years, his widow said.
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