Smoking and Tobacco Cessation

Smoking and Tobacco Cessation

“Little men working on my brain”

After smoking for about a decade, I started seriously thinking about quitting, partly because of something my wife said. It wasn’t a motivational speech like I might have expected, but the simple truth, “I don’t want you to die.”

Well, what do you say to that? Her cousin and my good friend, who happens to be a respiratory therapist, had offered to tell me some “stories,” when I was ready. Finally I was ready, so he told me all about how a person dies, slowly, from lung cancer, in graphic detail. The “Ya gotta go sometime” argument was completely blown for me at that point.

I’d like to say that with great determination I up and quit one day, but it really started when I got sick with a chest cold and had to stay in bed. I literally couldn’t smoke because I was coughing so badly. I woke up the next day and realized I’d gone without a cigarette for 24 hours, so I decided to go for another 24. It wasn’t too bad, but then I went back to work.

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I got through the first few hours, but that was all I could take. I was about to light up when I remembered some samples of nicotine gum that my aunt had sent me. I was very surprised that it actually did help. Even though my lungs felt like they were still starving for something, I felt better.

The mental part of all this was pretty tough. I had just been promoted, so I thought while I was trying to envision myself as a manager, I could just throw in the mental image of a nonsmoker, too. That wasn’t exactly easy. After a week or so of voracious chewing (according to my wife), I felt like I should be able to relax and let down my guard. But the reality was that at this and other milestones, I had to stay tough and aware of the task. The unconscious wasn’t taking over as quickly as I had expected.

I was also feeling kind of depressed, and I beat myself up a little for feeling such a loss over cigarettes. But then I realized that my brain had gotten used to the nicotine, and maybe had suppressed making chemicals of its own that affected my mood. So with that I developed a childlike but effective model of what was going on inside my head. I pictured little men up on scaffolds, working slowly but diligently on changing my brain, one section at a time, from a smoker to a nonsmoker. Oh, they took coffee breaks and lunch, but I think they worked all three shifts.

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Eventually they finished the job, and after six weeks or so of nicotine gum, I was done. I think it helped that I didn’t know my last cigarette was going to be my last cigarette, but I was also lucky that my wife gave me so much support. For years afterward, I had dreams in which I was smoking. (I still have them occasionally; I never dreamed about smoking when I was a smoker.) I do know that I’ll never smoke another cigarette, because after 14 years I still remember what it was like to quit.