crazyskillsbloginitiative

Wow. Half a year today. Things are looking up!

I don’t really even think about it anymore.

Going strong! Don’t miss the smoking so much anymore. Breathing has really cleared up a lot. I should probably switch to phase 3 patches, but 7mg of nicotine doesn’t sound like much :/

I’ll be in touch. Figured it was around a hundred days.

86 days can be converted to one of these units:

* 7,430,400 seconds
* 123,840 minutes
* 2064 hours
* 12 weeks (rounded down)

But who’s counting, right?

Yeah, so I am on the Stage 2 patches now and I am finding that I am mildly irritable. Oh well; I’ll get used to these I suppose. It’s a process, quitting. There are times - though not as many as I expected - and some quite surprising - when I still really want a cigarette. Some amount of that may never go away.

Now for the good news: My breathing! It is significantly better! I am finally past the inability to breathe when i wake up, which is very welcome. I think that the healing process has begun.

Funny though, I still think of myself as a smoker. I still have strong feelings about smokers’ rights and real frustrations with the suppressing of our (their) rights as smokers. I still think we should have smoking sections in restaurants and bars and I think that no matter where it is (ok maybe save a nuclear power plant) if you are outside, you ought to be able to smoke.

Maybe all that will change as I get more used to being a non-smoker. We shall see.

So.. What I really want is a cigarette. Except it isn’t even so much the tobacco or nicotine that I want - I just want to smoke something. So I figured I would write about all of the good things about being a smoker.

Well, first of all…

Ok fine, so I can’t think of a big long list of positive things about smoking. I think my favorite thing about having a cigarette was that it made me no longer want to have a cigarette. Yeah.

So, the bad things:
Smoking makes it difficult to breathe.
You risk setting your house on fire by not extinguishing a cigarette properly or emptying an ashtray before it is completely out.
Smoking makes your house (and you) smell like smoking. This one never bothered me as a smoker - I couldn’t smoke a damn thing - but now, if someone smokes in their house, you know it.
Health risks: including cancer, hart problems, but also including just making it in general difficult to breathe. Which sucks. Big time. Breathing is one of your basics - hell, perhaps the single most basic basic. And these days I am breathing better (though it did get worse before it got better.)
The expense. Can you believe that cigarettes are damn near $5 a pack these days? Hell, I remember buying (my first pack of) cigarettes, from a machine no less, for $1.25. Get off my lawn.
The chance of burning a hole in the seat, floor, roof of my sharp automobile.
It always used to piss me off when it came to eating out. In Ohio, you can’t smoke inside restaurants or even bars anymore. And that used to really piss me off. I still think smokers should be allowed to smoke in bars, but I no longer have to be inconvenienced by this.

All of that said, what was it that caused me to decide to quit? Was it the inconvenience? The expense? The risks of burning things? The health risks?

Yeah. I think so.

I want a cigarette, but I know better.  Serious trouble breathing this morning and awoke to an empty inhaler!  Ack!  Still paying for all that time when I was a smoker.  They say it takes half as long as you smoked to be completely recovered from the damage done by smoking.  So let’s see here…  I smoked off and on from about 1990 until 2009.  So 19 years is 228 months and I have been a nonsmoker for a month, leaving me with 227 months which means I will be recovered in 9.45 years or at the end of the summer of 2018.

And I thought I was going to be encouraged by working the numbers.

It seems to get somewhat easier as time goes on.. though I still really crave a cigarette.  The really good thing about this whole situation is that I am not replacing nicotine with another substance.  I am, however, using the patches and I think that has made the whole process a little more bearable.  I do not look forward to the day when I switch to the 14mg patches (right now, I’m still on the 21s.)  I imagine that will be difficult like the first few days again until I get used to only having that much nicotene.  It’s getting easier (finally) to breathe in the mornings, which is a very good thing..  Took long enough.

Moving right along.  I guess it is getting easier each day.  I should say I am getting a little bit more used to it  every day.  I still miss smoking.

I’m still having trouble breathing especially when I first wake up, but today that went a little better.  It’s freaky not being able to breathe.  That’s really the main reason why I am doing this.  I’m young.  I ought to be able to breathe.  Sure I enjoy smoking, but I enjoy breathing more.  They say that change comes when the pain of recovery is less than the pain of continuing.  Seems awfully pessimistic, but I’d say that was the case for me.

I really want a cigarette…

Yeah.

Just the way it goes, I guess.  It’s better with the patches.  I’m not looking forward to switching to a lower nicotine patch phase though.  And that is the plan.  To finally phase it out completely (because of the cost of it.)  Nicotine won’t kill you - it’s the smoke that’s carcinogenic.  But I don’t want to be on the patches for the rest of my life.  But for now, it can’t hurt.  And they help - considerably.

Hanging in there.  It’s amazing how used to something you can get.  I keep thinking - ‘Ooh I know!  I’ll have a cigarette…’  or ‘Oh yeah - that’s what I’m forgetting to do!’  Ahhhhh… It’s not easy, but I’ll get through.  The chest pain has been getting a little better every day, though I am still coughing like mad when I first wake up.  Hopefully that will go away over time.