The Mighty 730!!!…

Two years of SMO-briety

I got my daily quit mail this morning and here is what it said ….

Your  Quit Date is: Monday, May 11, 2009 at 12:00:00 AM
Time Smoke-Free: 730 days, 5 hours, 14 minutes and 18 seconds
Cigarettes NOT smoked: 14,604
Lifetime Saved: 3 months, 21 days, 13 hours
Money Saved: J$390,550.00

I honestly find it hard to believe that I stopped smoking 2 years ago, there are times when it feels like I stopped smoking only recently and then there are times that I forget that I ever did.  So to honor my landmark I decided to write a blog about my journey to smo-briety (yeah I made up a word, sue me!!)

I can actually remember my first cigarette, a Benson & Hedges that I had secreted out of my uncles top pocket.  I had grown up around smokers, my father smoked and my uncles smoked, so I was curious.  At the end of my first cigarette all I could think was “bleh….I don’t get it”.  It was years between then and when I actually started “really smoking”.  I was for a long time what I call a “posing puffer”, you’ve all seen them, the person at the party cigarette in hand who take the maybe two or three puffs and never actually inhales.  I can also remember the day I actually started really smoking, my friend Mark was visiting me at home when I lit up, he started laughing at me and said I wasn’t really smoking, he then showed me how to inhale, I can recall the heady rush as nicotine hit my system for the first time.  That was that, I was now a smoker.

No matter what anyone says I am unapologetic about the years that I smoked, I used to enjoy smoking.  Any smoker can tell you that there is nothing like that first cigarette of the day, add a cup of coffee to that and that is how I fortified myself to face the work day for many a year.  My cigarettes were my constant companion, comforter, stress relief….cigarettes prevented many a cross word and diffused many a tense situation.  Me and my cigarettes “had a time”.

But like anything else that time needed to come to an end.  I had tried stopping many times before, but had always gone back after having “just that one cigarette”.  This time around I had a plan, I set a date, I joined a support group, I got patches and enlisted the help of friends and family, for the first time I really wanted to stop smoking.  For those you think you “just stop smoking”, that’s not how it works, everyone’s process is different, but the first step must be that you really want to and this time I did.  On the night of Sunday May the 10^th 2009 I smoked my very last cigarette and went to sleep, on the morning of May 11^th I became a non-smoker.

I have no fear that I will ever start smoking again, even though every now and again out of the blue that old familiar craving will pop up.  I don’t want to smoke, and I certainly don’t want to repeat the anxiety filled process of quitting again.  I developed what is called a “quit cough” a few days after I stopped smoking, this happens when your lungs are trying to heal themselves, the black mucus I coughed up is a stomach turning sight I will never repeat.

So cheers to me and my mighty 730 days smoke free, I’m on to 1,095 next.

p.s. I still can’t account for that $390k…what the hell did I do with it!!!