onthemark

After quitting in July 2015 I got a bunch of health checks to be sure I was ok. One of these was a chest xray in October that caught a nodule in my lung. Turned out to be invasive adenocarcinoma of the lung. They found another tiny nodule in the operation in January 2016 so I ended up getting a full 16 week course of chemotherapy too. I still haven't completely recovered from the chemo but I am happy to be alive at 55. 

I paid a big price for smoking but not so far the ultimate one. 

I don't know how many have heard of this, but a Florida man recently died when his vape pen exploded: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44149281.

There have been about two hundred reported explosions of vape pens in the US since they were introduced. That is pretty scary. On the other hand 

Quote

"Cigarette fires cause close to 1,000 deaths and 3,000 injuries each year in the united states, according to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). As the ignition source in fires responsible for over 20% of all fire deaths , cigarettes are the nations largest single cause of such deaths."

 

who knew?

I quit and failed so many times that I became convinced that I was also a hopeless addict who would forever be a smoker. Thank goodness to be free of that kind of slavery. At first it was just noping my way through each day, or sometimes it was moment by moment at thebeginning. quitting is tough but it is not impossibly difficult. I'm on some lung cancer message boards and sometimes read stories about patients smoking until their literal last breath when they simply could hold a cig or inhale anymore. At least I won't go out a smoker.

Thank you for your post, Give. Be proud of your beautiful quit. 

I'm approaching 3 years. The first months were hard. I fell into a depression and had a lot of anxiety. At first, the morning, after meal, and cigarettes to take a 'break' from whatever I was doing were the hardest to let go of. Now I don't have those triggers but still occasionally think about smoking when I am bored. I had to believe that I really could quit for good after so many failures. Participating on a forum made all the difference for me.

Hi Hermine,

Nice to see you hear and congrats on your wonderful quit.

Great post GITW, and congratulations on your 6 month quit. I know what you mean about feeling like a doofus for smoking all those years. Hmm, what colour are our lungs by now?

One day you can look back fondly at this time and be so proud of yourself that you learned how to free yourself from the nicotine addiction. Everything you are going through is because of the addiction and the only way to make these unpleasant feelings go away for good is to never take another puff again. Keep up the great work you are doing and don't fret over how long it takes with the patches.

On a different forum for people with serious diseases, including many people who are there because of cigarettes, I see quite a few threads of the form "trying to quit smoking..." I used to approach my quit that way before,

 I see these people posting again later, how they 'slipped;. Sometimes I post there and give a little blurb of the values of a dedicated quit smoking forum, namely us here, but I often think people are looking more for sympathy or to rant than to really quit smoking. Sadly there are lots of people with COPD, lung cancer or heart disease to name a few, who continue to smoke, believe it or not.

Be glad you aren't one of them.

yuck! it's awful to think what I did to myself all those years of smoking. Thanks for sharing, Whispers.

teams

Pumpkin, in the past I threw away several long quits because of some deeply disappointing, even traumatic event in my life, thinking that I now had 'permission' to smoke because of the lousy thing that had happened. Boy was I wrong. You might want to spend some time examining the train of thought you went through to pick up a cigarette again after almost a year. It's called learning from mistakes. You can learn and quit again, this time for good. Keep posting and stay close to the board. You must feel terribly lonely now. Is that what brought you back to smoking?

Thanks for sharing Sazerac. I had no idea they could quantify with a biological marker how long someone had smoked and the recovery from that insult to the human body. I used to justify that smoking was 'my only vice'... But it was like playing Russian roulette.

pyramid

warps

A large number of studies over decades have shown that nicotine replacement therapy, including gum, increase the odds of quitting successfully by a factor from 1.5 to 2. I don't know where Joel is getting his numbers. See for instance the publically available Cochrane review at:

http://cochranelibrary-wiley.com/store/10.1002/14651858.CD000146.pub2/asset/CD000146.pdf?v=1&t=jg9zzsb3&s=bb7d6e63b3f1a6a11635dead60b65ef2e534aa5a

So the upshot is that I wouldn't pay too much attention to that 1% claim. Having said that my successful quit was cold turkey. It worked the best for me at the time.

sometimes cannabis is mixed with tobacco in joints. i would avoid those as well as smoking anything early in the quit. The same with alcohol. After that it is a personal decision but one does have to be careful at first if it triggers urges to smoke cigs.

raise

Elvis

Peanut butter: smooth or crunchy

drops

trek

doses

I learned that I could overcome my cigarette addiction.

Shoulder

daydream believer