Tuesday night I decided to quit smoking so I dumped my pack of cigarettes in the toilet and braced myself for hell. Wednesday morning I started coughing. I expected this as I’ve read it’s normal for the lungs to clean themselves out. The only problem was this is a very dry, painful, scratchy throat cough.
I ended up taking Wednesday and Thursday off work because I was coughing so much I would have disrupted others and it was wearing me down. Friday I managed 3 hours at work before I bailed. I had managed to do almost 3 days without a cigarette though and that’s quite an accomplishment for me. Friday night things got hectic and I broke down and bought a pack of smokes. My coughing has gone down quite a bit and what’s left is a productive cough (something comes up but it ain’t pretty!).
Anyway, I’m going to try to stop again tonight, but I can’t deal with missing more work. I’ve tried Halls Strawberry cough drops and Tylenol cough/cold medication and they aren’t helpful in the least. I’ve been drinking more water than usual but that hasn’t helped either.
Has anyone got any other good remedies? Largely the area that hurts is my throat and upper chest - both seem very dry and raw when I wasn’t smoking. Thanks for any advice.
Gotta agree with Stoid—see a doctor. Maybe the patch will help.
Good choice deciding to quit. You’ll save yourself a lot of discomfort as you get older. It’s shocking what smoking can do to you over time; we tend to think of the lungs, but smoking does a LOT of bad things to you.
It can be done! I quit on May 24th of this year and haven’t looked back. I used the patch, but not for the entire recommended time I used level 1 for 2 weeks, level 2 for 2 weeks, level 3 for 1 week and never even used the last 2 patches.
The coughing part of it was really bad for me, too. That was part of the reason I stuck to the program. I never wanted to go throught the 2-3 days of coughing again. You can read about it in this thread, which has a lot of good advice.
I forgot to add,
Smoke free for:
Three months, three weeks, one day, 11 hours, 14 minutes and 58 seconds.
2289 cigarettes not smoked, saving $457.87.
Life saved: 1 week, 22 hours, 45 minutes.