Are You a Smoker? Do You Want to Quit?

When you are young, you are invincible, nothing can happen to you, only to the other person. We all thought that way, in one form or another, although I'm certain that most of us didn't spend too much time evaluating the issues.

I started smoking when I was fourteen-years old and, by the time I was twenty-one, I was comfortably smoking two large packages of unfiltered cigarettes a day. I quit, "cold turkey", when I was twenty-eight and have not gone back to smoking since.

Both of my parents smoked. Before they died, they both suffered miserably as a result of their habit. My mother, although clear of mind, spent the last six years of her life bedridden and hooked to oxygen 24 hours a day - due to respiratory damage directly a result of smoking.

My father was luckier. He could walk - just barely. From the tips of his toes to just below his knees, he was a blue colour and nearing a point where gangrene was about to claim his lower legs and then, mercifully, he died. The root cause - smoking. His family doctor explained to me the cause of his problem: His routine oxygen intake, because of smoking, was not enough to feed all parts of his body so, the brain, (being the marvel that it is), had to subconsciously determine what parts needed oxygen the most in order to keep dad alive. It, accordingly to his doctor, chose: the liver, kidneys, brain, lungs and other vital organs, and then sent whatever was left to the more important extremities. It ran out of oxygen before it could feed the lower legs, which, it deemed, (and rightly so), were unnecessary for life.

Okay, enough of the reality check. I think you have the picture. Please don't get smug about what happened to my parents. If you are smoking, you are at a very high risk to experience what happened to them, and things might be much worse if you have gained weight.

There are many methods of quitting, none of them easy. The pharmaceutical companies are making a fortune on providing you with remedies. I'm not a medical practitioner so I won't comment on their effectiveness. I suggest that you check with your family doctor before buying any of the on-shelf items and take his/her advise.

Here's what happened to me. When I was twenty-eight, I started to have breathing problems and began coughing up globs of black phlegm. I went to my family doctor - very scared. In my shirt pocket was a large pack of cigarettes with about two cigarettes gone. The doctor knew I smoked and how much. He checked me over, shrugged his shoulders, and said rather coldly, that I was on the precipice of lung cancer. He gave me two options:

Continue smoking and the cancer would be upon me soon; or

Quit smoking and hope like hell that time would turn things around for me.

I quit. But it wasn't easy. I found that I had developed the habit of having something in my mouth, which was part of the smoking routine. So, to compensate for the cigarettes, I filled my shirt pocket with toothpicks. Whenever I had the urge to smoke, I plucked a toothpick from my pocket and chewed the dickens out of it. (Of course, I ran the risk of becoming addicted to toothpicks, but . . . ).

As well, I set small, reasonable, milestones in the beginning. When I awoke in the morning, I decided that I would quit until noon. At noon, I decided to quit until supper time, and so on.

After a day or so, I had reached a point where I didn't want to lose what I had achieved. After one week, I was over the steep hill and, in my opinion, had just about beaten the addictive phase. It became progressively easier from that point forward. Today, in my early-sixties, I thank my lucky stars for quitting when I did.

I encourage you to take the same steps. Don't put it off. First, see your family doctor for advise, and then toss the cigarettes away like I did, and jump in with both feet. After one week or so, you'll be heading on the down-slope of permanent quitting.

I also encourage you, in closing, to take a large cookie jar and put the daily amount that you would have spent on cigarettes in it. At the end of one year you'll have enough money to take an European vacation or, if you so chose, to make a good down-payment on a new car. The subsequent monthly savings from not smoking would be enough to cover the ensuing monthly payments.

Have a healthy and prosperous 2009 - smoke free.

Send me a note if you have any questions.

Gary