Luisa's One Year Smoke Free Milestone

"I started smoking at the tender age of 16."

It finally arrived! It is like Christmas morning... You wait for it, and wait for it, and open your presents and then... You can finally relax; it is over, it has happened… You are there, and very content.

I started smoking at the tender age of 16. Everyone in my family smoked; both my parents and my three older sisters, so I guess I was doomed, particularly back in the '70's, when smoking was seen as a sign of "maturity". I didn’t give it much thought, even though at age 13 I tried to get my sister off cigarettes by buying her a pack of nicotine gum (totally new to the market and advertised on TV). She used them for a couple of days and told me to forget it. She still smokes, some two packs a day, even after having breast cancer back in 2001 (sigh).

I met John, who would become my husband, in January. I was there learning English and he was there doing a work term from University. We got married December 1981, after being apart, one in each country, for almost a couple of years, and I moved to be with him. He is a never smoker and hated my smoking, but I kept on telling him that he knew I was a smoker when we got married, so it was his problem.

I gave a first try to quitting a few years later, in 1985, through SmokEnders. I had paid so much money I couldn’t afford that I kept the quit for supposedly around eight months. I say “supposedly” because, if I really tell the truth to myself, it lasted more like five months.

To that attempt many others followed. I had three children in 1987. Yes, you read correctly. Three the same year, the girl was born in January and the twin boys in December. I did not quit smoking during pregnancies. I only slowed down. Both boys have asthma. I don’t know if it is because of the smoking or because they were premature. The babyhood years and early childhood are still a blur to me, so I didn’t even gave a second thought to quitting.

In 1996 we moved to Spain. Many failed attempts followed. I tried the gum, the patch and several cold turkey tries. None of them worked for any more than a couple of months at the most. It really started getting me upset. DH hated every smoke I took. He coughed every time I lit up. I was getting terribly upset about my smoking. My mouth felt like an ashtray. I coughed every night in bed. I couldn’t take a deep breath without choking. I would wheeze half of the time. Every time I got a cold, it would last me forever.

I live in Spain, where smoking is the rule. Everybody smokes! Everywhere. That made it even harder, with the added problem that every time I quit, I would gain a lot of weight that would take me a long time to get off. Until I got tired of it. Until I said to myself "enough is enough".

Luisa's Story, page two