To echo** gonzomax **yes I think you should quit - for your loved ones if not for you.
A very good long term smoker friend was able to do it with over the counter Nicoderm CQ "patch"s
I didn’t describe my father’s early death. Suffice it to say it was particularly horrific, and a result of vascular disease caused by smoking. If I told you the whole story, you’d quit for sure. PM me if you want to know.
I’ve given this last year to cancer, to receiving surgery, aggressive chemo, and radiation to cure the damn thing. I promise you it’s a whole lot harder than quitting smoking. I’ve been through it myself - I quit after several tries when my father got smoking-related bladder cancer at age 40. His was easily cured with surgery, and proved to be the least of his worries.
If you decide hard enough, you can endure whatever it takes to quit. The deciding is the hardest part. You can’t approach it as…well, I’ll try to quit again… You endured more in childbirth, you’d do it if your children’s lives depended on it, you can do it for you and your family now. We women were built to endure hardships, and I know you’d succeed if you were certain you needed to. Trust me, you need to.
I think you should quit if you want to quit.
If you don’t want to quit, it doesn’t matter what I or anyone else thinks.
If you decide you do want to quit, feel free to open a new thread about ideas for staying stopped.
I’ve been stopped for about 6 years now.
I quit using Chantix.
To be honest, I didn’t expect it to work. I was one of these people who’d tried a wide variety of things - from the Alan Carr book to patches to gum to cold turkey. I did a lot of reading and had a long talk with my doctor before I was willing to fill the prescription. And even then, I didn’t start taking it for a good 10 days after I filled it.
And I kept smoking. At the week mark, when you’re supposed to stop smoking, I kept on - sure, I could tell I didn’t really want the ones I was having, and I knew I was smoking less, but I was still smoking. Then, about one more week in, I was leaving work and had my last cigarette in my pack and I just though, well, what if I don’t buy any more? I don’t really want this one. There was no savoring of that last one - but it was my last one.
I took Chantix for about six weeks total and stopped taking it just before a cross country move. Physical cravings are minimal - fleeting, and I can’t remember the last one I had. Mental cravings still happen, but I now have the ability to recognize them for what they are and go right through them. I can separate the physical from mental now, and I couldn’t do that for years.
The drawbacks: it seriously messed with me for the first couple of days (like, irrational reactions) and when the dosage stepped up. At each point, after a day or two I was fine - and once I had my first irrational reaction, I could expect them and not have the blowup I had the first time it seemingly came out of nowhere.
I also had really messed up dreams. This one lasted the whole time - but went away once I stopped.
In late March, I will hit one year smoke free. I can’t even tell you what the date was - the decision to not have anymore was such a non-event when I was taking Chantix. So, it worked for me.