If something killed him, it wasn’t going to be his lungs. Gordon Everett convinced himself of that when he started smoking.

“My thinking back then was, ‘My lungs are tough,’” he said. “I figured if I got sick with anything, it would be cardiac.”

The North Bend man has a history of confronting medical challenges. He was diagnosed with polio at nine months old. Doctors said he’d never walk. They were wrong. He not only got control of his legs, he also developed into one of Southern California’s top gymnastic talents.

Gordon made all-conference three times in high school. His prowess on the pommel horse, parallel bars and rings led his squad to a second-place finish in Southern California. A respiratory therapist tested his lungs, marveling at their capacity. He jokingly describes his self-image in those days: “Mr. Invincible.”

He kept up gymnastics in college at San Jose State. After college he went to work at a nearby hospital and later married a co-worker.

He tried a cigarette in his late 20s. It was disgusting.

But when his marriage fell apart, he moved in with a chain-smoking friend. One night, he asked for a puff.

“It went down pretty easy,” he said. “It just came to be a habit.”

He wound up smoking a pack a day for five years. He didn’t want his friends and family to know what he was doing, so he only smoked in the car or by himself at home. He refused to buy cigarettes in bulk, which became a point of illogical pride.

“I can say I never bought a carton, but I bought a (lot) of packs,” he said.

He continued working, and smoking, in San Jose until 2000, when his parents developed health problems. To be closer to them, he took a job as a department manager at Medford’s Providence Medical Center. That’s where he met Tonya. She was working as a register clerk and going through a divorce. They married in 2002.

On their wedding night, Gordon promised to give up smoking. He kept his word for four years. It wasn’t easy. Though hospitals provide health care, the people who work there don’t always keep healthy habits. They can suffer stress from the long hours and working with people in pain.

Cigarette butts littered the sidewalks. If he saw a particularly big one, Gordon had to resist the urge to pick it up and light it.

He left Providence in 2004 after his daughter, Piper, was born.

Later that year, Gordon accepted a temporary posting at Bay Area Hospital, but the rest of the family stayed in Medford. Tonya needed an unexpected surgery and his stepdaughter Alexis Woodruff developed a kidney problem. Worrying and feeling isolated in Coos Bay, Gordon took up smoking again.

“I never loved it. I just found myself doing it. It was mindless,” he said. “I used smoking to fight the stress.”

Eventually, his family joined him in a new home in North Bend. But the family reunion couldn’t get Gordon to give up his cigarettes. Neither did the news that his friend who had introduced him to tobacco had died from heart problems.

Gordon kept sneaking puffs on the way to work and on the drive home. He smoked cigarettes with his coffee, then denied it to his stepdaughters and Tonya.

But it was obvious to them. They hassled him about it. Gordon persisted for three years.

“Just ornery,” he explained. Quitting was hard, too.

He only gave up the habit when he suffered a transient ischemic attack, sometimes known as a “warning stroke.”

Quitting no longer was difficult, Gordon said. He’d had enough. But the damage was done.

Two months later, after swearing off the smokes, Gordon learned his eight years of smoking would cost him his life. The news was hard, but harder still was explaining the situation to the girls.

“When I told them I had cancer, they asked, ‘Well, how did you get it?’” Gordon recalled.

“Then they knew I had done something in my life that was really stupid.”

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