The Many Attempts to Quit

"I kept quitting and starting..."

The colic proved to be my undoing as I was going batty from all the crying and all the frustration of feeling so helpless to help her. It was sometime in the 3rd month of being an ex-smoker that I threw up my hands and marched down to the corner grocer where I picked up the pack that would set me back on the road to picking up where I left off...and I wouldn't stop for another 18 years.

Oh, I did try to quit...time after time after time. I guess I've quit hundreds of times! But, I didn't get serious about it until I developed more of a smoker's cough and more of a breathing problem. My mom could hear a pin drop and would comment whenever we visited them how wheezy I sounded and my dad would launch into his evils of smoking lecture once more, after telling me that I "smell like a cigar!" Being an old Navy man who had smoked a pipe for many a year and quit, he felt he knew what he was talking about. Did I believe him...well, I sure was beginning to! Actually, I think I knew by then that I HAD to quit.

It became even more of a priority when a gal who worked at the local pet shop, an acquaintance who also smoked a lot, developed cancer of the larynx and throat. She went through surgery after surgery where they removed more and more of her face and throat each time. She had to write her thoughts to me instead of being able to talk to me. She said, "Chris, cigarettes did this to me." I was devastated to learn she had died not long after the hospital visit that opened my eyes finally to what these cigarettes could do. So I took one of those Freedom From Smoking classes and had only sporadic success with that.

The films I'd seen in those classes would not disappear from my mind. Whoever thought of showing smokers what lungs look like on the inside was just brilliant! Who can forget that lovely scene...cut open lungs...black lungs...not pink...not healthy! But, even with that and all the facts they threw at me, I kept quitting and starting...unable to break the addiction long enough to truly kick it. Frustrated and wildly uptight, I thought my family was going to ask me to start smoking again just so I could be myself once again! Without their asking, I obliged, so I was off and running, taking 5 minutes off my life with every cigarette I smoked once more.

One day, I thought...let's get serious here. Go buy the nicotine patches and see if they help me over the dreaded withdrawal stages! And they did! It was so much better this time and I reveled in the fact that the cravings were nearly non-existent for a change! So I managed to get a few weeks of being smoke-free and was beginning to take it for granted that I was alright and had it licked at long last. Man, that nicotine addiction is sneaky! It marched right up and whacked me alongside the head one day after a big disagreement with my family so I learned what stress triggers were! I went out and as much as said, "I'll show you, I'll kill me! So there!" as I ripped off the patch and lit up a cigarette.

A few months later, I quit again and donned the patch once more. Three days later, while I was out in my workshop working on a piece of stained glass, I began to shake and shiver uncontrollably...and I felt strange. It stopped after a few minutes and I thought no more of it until it happened again a little later. I thought perhaps it was my body coming up with a new way of withdrawing from cigarettes. However, I told my husband that I felt like maybe it was the flu coming on, and would go see a doctor the next morning. Feeling weakened, I put myself to bed and dropped right off to sleep. Hours later, I awoke coughing up blood and again shaking and shivering, unable to stop. My husband tossed me in the car and zoomed the two miles to the local hospital emergency room at three in the morning.

It turned out to be a bit more serious than the flu...they hospitalized me for pneumonia and my doctor said that I had been only minutes away from the ICU when I got there. They worked fast and were able to prevent my getting worse, thank God. I stayed in the hospital for a week and got very little rest. I discovered that they don't let you sleep at night in a hospital! They do all manner of things to your body at night in a hospital, none of it dealing with getting rest. I was SO glad to get out of there and into my own bed at long last. I felt like a new person when I got out of the hospital, but I had medication in the form of pills and inhalers and they have become my lifelong buddies ever since.

Managing to stay quit for seven months, I went through another family crisis leading to the latest relapse. After I had calmed down, I threw out the rest of one pack out the car window, vowing that this was it...that I wasn't going to ruin my life further. The road to hell is, indeed, paved with good intentions.