The one-year anniversary of Mr. Legend’s quit date is coming up this weekend. He’d smoked pretty heavily for over 30 years, and it wasn’t (and sometimes still isn’t) easy for him. I’m very, very, very proud of him and of all of you who’ve managed or even tried to quit!
I’ve seen a lot of talk about illnesses caused by smoking, but a couple of months ago, my fiance and I experienced the bad effects of someone else’s smoking. My fiance lived in a beautiful old building with wooden interiors. It was a former railway hotel which had a gorgeous, steamed-wood spiral staircase which led up through the center of the building. On a Saturday afternoon, while my fiance was on vacation and I was running errands, one of his neighbors fell asleep while smoking, set his mattress on fire, panicked (I assume), then set the building on fire. As a result, a gorgeous wooden building containing 12 apartments was destroyed. The people in it got out with the clothes on their backs and nothing else. A salvage company was able to recover some things after the fire, but not much. My fiance may have been the best off, since he was on vacation and had renters insurance, but I think he must have lost 80% of what he owned. The only up side is no one was hurt. The man who set the fire lived in the building because his mother had lived in that apartment for 30 years and didn’t want to leave it when her husband died. She’s had to leave it now.
The man who started this fire is a young man. Emphysema, lung cancer, etc. are a long way in his future. The fire which destroyed the home his mother, my fiance, the landlord, and several other tenants loved is now two months in his past. If you’ll excuse the Pit-like comments, God damn it, I hope he gives up smoking! (Learning how to properly work a fire extinguisher would also be nice, but if he hadn’t been smoking in the first place, he wouldn’t have needed to use it.)
I agree, do whatever it takes to quit.
I tried the Chantix before reading the book. It cost me $100 a month and turned me into a zombie. True, I didn’t feel like smoking, but I didn’t feel like doing anything other than lying down and watching TV. That lasted two months and I went back to smoking.
The book cost me $15 and there were zero side effects. Stopping smoking was almost an enjoyable experience. So, for me, the book was the best route.
December 29th, 1999.
My last cigarette.
Almost 8 years later and I have only regretted it once - when a friend in Las Vegas offered me a real honest-to-goodness Cuban cigar and I declined. I knew that if I smoked ANYTHING - I’d be right back to the cigs in a heartbeat.
I guess I’ll go through the rest of my life never experiencing a Cuban cigar.
April 26th 2003 - Last smoke.
My brother is the only one in the family who still smokes - he was the least addicted of all of us, usually only having 5-10 a day. I did 20-25, my parents did 50-60, each.
I worked out once, that on a wet Sunday in Wellington (most) we would sit in the lounge with the smoke from 150 cigarettes between us. We couldn’t *breath *properly until we’d choked down the first fag of the day.
My folks quit about '91-'92 after dad’s second heart attack.
I did it for my kid. Not for her health, since I smoked outside, but because giving them up meant we could afford a bigger house with a tree in the yard.
All the other benefits have been a bonus.
bizarrely, unlike the rest of you who know nearly to the minute when you quit, i can’t tell you exactly when i did.
it will be either three - or four - years ago this coming mid-february. 
i was halfway quit anyway by the time i signed up for a job-sponsored quit smoking class, and it’s apparently done the trick.
you have to want to quit before you can quit - no question about it. i was about a pack a day puffer. i’d quit several times but would always start back up again when the stress factors built.
this time, when i was abruptly told i had six months before my formerly-fulltime job (yes, same outfit that sponsored the quit-smoking program. bastards…) became parttime, i didn’t reach for a cigarette.
that’s when i knew i’d quit for good.
surprisingly, i don’t miss it with or without a drink in hand, and i can actually taste food. on the down side, food did become an issue for a while, but four months on adipex took off the extra pounds in no time and fortunately deflected my need-for-food-substitution in other directions that don’t make me gain weight. my knees are still thanking me.
kudos to everyone out there that has quit and is trying to quit. if i can do it, anyone can. :eek:
im curently a smoker. How ever im in the process of becoming a new religon that i firmly belive in . That requires me to quit " u are gods temple keep it clean". anyways they have a smoking diverson that u do to stop smoking. My brother stoped using this same method to stop. cudos to him by the way. here is what the say. as many of us smokers know when u stop U get as my other brother would call the munchies. aka you are substuiting for a old with a new one. so first there is a shoping list vitman c tablets 500mg you can find these in any supper market across america with all the other vitmans. Vitman C will help your body detox. healthy snavks aka fruits and veggies to fight thr munchies. cinnamin tooth paste mint mouth wash. unsweetend grapefruit juice. bleach not to be taken internally. every morning when u wake up have a healthy breakfast then go stright to the bathroom and brush your teeth then use mouth wash. return to kitchen with 1000 mg of vitamin c and take with Grapefruit juce during your day when u notice the urge to smoke. Advert your attion to a diffrent activitys like go for a walk in the mall smoking is not allowed in the mall so u will be less tempted to smoke. munch your healthy snacks etc if it gets to bad jist go brush your teeth mouth wash and grape fruit . take 1000 mg three times during the first day. during the next 6 days only take 500mg of vitman c with grapefruit juice three times a day. Have strangth and by day 8 you will reallise that you feel better all your foold will taste better and you and your clothes smell better. as far as the bleach follow the directions on the back of the bottle to make bleach watter and scrub and wash every surface in your home to get years of smoke and tar off your walls. treet your floor with a good steam cleaning and your house will smell better.
ps monday i start this ill let you know how it goes
tomarrow is the day wish me luck
Sending supporting thoughts your way!
I think that folk simply do not understand what longer term illness means, what chronic means, and do not understand that irreversible means just that.
You see things like a person being shot on tv, the person is back in full action in the following weeks episode, you’ll see someone slugged out from behind and dragged of to the evil masters lair, they come around and are full of beans, no side effects of concussion.
TV gives you the idea that damage to the human frame doesn’t have long term consequencies, yet we all know someone who maybe got bronchitis as a child and they have never really shaken the effects off, or perhaps someone with a permanent limp after a a car/bike crash.
Smoking is one of those, when we say smoking kills, its not in a nice painless 10 second death scene way, it usually drags on for years, sometimes a couple of decades, and you slowly degrade, your body just wears out and gives up, part by part.
Your lifesyle goes downhill, at first something like emphysema is a little inconvenient, you find you get out of breath a little quick, but so what, lots of other folk you age get out of breath almost as quick as you.
Then you start to work around it, you use the car more, you get the lift instead of walking up one floor, and then you get counter staff to carry your shopping out to the car park.
But you carry on smoking, tomorrow will not be all that much worse will it ?
One more pack won’t do all that much more damage?
If you are lucky you’ll have a heart attack or a thrombosis that kills you fairly quickly. Chances are though you’ll end up with maybe a damaged function, a leg or an arm won’t work anymore, maybe speaking will be a little slurred.
It wasn’t the last pack of cigarettes that did this to you, it was years of working for it, twenty, thirty of them, you spent tens of thousands of dollars, you’re going to spend a lot more just trying to keep breathing.
Now you’ll take the next 10 maybe 15 years feeling like you are drowning, and the rest of the family will be there to see it all, your privacy and dignity will be difficult to maintain, meantime you’ll probably see a grandchild in their late teens who has started smoking, and though you won’t like to believe it, you are part of the reason they started, because your regular smoking made it seem normal.
I wonder if you will ever forgive yourself.
I think that people are smarter than you’re giving them credit for. You’d have to be living under a rock these days to not know that smoking is a bad idea.
What I think you’re failing to understand is that addiction is not a choice. What us smokers need to learn is not that smoking is bad for us. We need to learn the tools to fight the addiction. That’s far harder. If you’ve never fought that battle, then you don’t understand the nature of the battle.
I think its not just smokers that work like this, most of us rationalise things like poor diet, lack of excercise etc.
We do it to a larger extent, global warming, etc, let the problem become obvious and deal with it then.
The problem about smoking is the lack of immediacy to the health issues, ten years, twenty or more is something that folk put off, it isn’t a problem now so deal with when it becomes one.
People may have an intellectual knowledge of the health problems, but somehow they are unable to personalise it, and relate it directly to themselves.
I’ll bet that if you knew your next cigarette would kill you in screaming agony you would give it up despite the addiction, and yes there would be a number who didn’t, but the vast majority would.
Addiction is just a reason not to do something about smoking, it finds a way to rationalise, it makes excuses for you, its corrosive and insidious.
Virtually everyone has had a pain worse than smoking addiction to deal with, a kick in the balls etc, but somehow we find a way to cope with it, addiction is just another pain that lasts a couple of weeks.
The pain from smoking addiction will not kill you, but maintaining the habit will and certain sorts of cancer pain are much worse.
Pain from addiction withdrawal is good pain, like childbirth is a good pain even though this is excruciating, and both have their time and pass.
OK, your post #33 was far more constructive and insightful than your post #31, which I found not only to be unhelpful but quite possibly harmful.
You understand that you can’t scare or shame someone into quitting, right? Sorry, dude, but your comment “I wonder if you will ever forgive yourself” was quite possibly one of the lamest things I ever read on these boards, and that’s saying something. Yes, I will be able to forgive myself. I forgive myself right now. I fell into a trap. It happens. It happens to a lot of us. It’s part of the human condition. I refuse to feel ashamed of being human.
But you’re right about how insidious the addiction is. (As I type this, I just snuffed out a cig.) The next one won’t kill me. The next hundred won’t kill me. That’s the awful thing about it. It’s such an incredibly harmless addiction that just a little more will do me no harm at all. How ingenious is that? What was that line from that movie I saw last night? Something like “The most sinister thing the devil did was to make people believe that he didn’t exist.” That’s the nature of all addiction. The risk is so incredibly small that people will pile that risk on, day in and day out for decades, until they die. Prematurely.
Your insight that the pain of withdrawel is a good thing is spot on. It’s not the lack of nicotine that causes the pain, it’s the presence of it. The short term cure to the pain is the long term cause of it.
Great comments in post #33. But you posted some real crap in post #31. You basically stated that all smokers are stupid enough to think that TV violence is the same as real violence.
Don’t insult our intelligence. You only cause harm that way.