Quitting a habit that kills
My three elementary-age children came home from school in the fall of 2005 and found me where I usually was at that time of day, stretched out in a chair on the back deck of our home, enjoying the weak sunshine of early November and the Merit UltraLight 100 cigarette between my lips. The kids walked through a cloud of secondhand smoke to get to me, but I was unconcerned because I didn’t believe the smoke was bad for them, despite medical evidence that it was.
I was about to become a deer in the headlights of my 6-year-old twins’ logic about grownups and their cigarettes. It was my first inkling that real change in my 26-year smoking habit was speeding toward me.
"How was school?" I asked the three of them brightly. Abby, one of my twins, went straight to her point. "Mom," she asked in the matter-of-fact voice she sometimes used to say she wanted a second helping of rice for dinner, "Why do you want to kill yourself with cigarettes?" She was not judgmental, only curious. Cole, her more sensitive twin brother, was full of dramatic fears. "Don’t die, Mommy," he said, half crying, wrapping his arm around my neck. Clearly, he thought I soon would be in a casket 6 feet under, what with my no-doubt black lungs and all.
Kuranda, the oldest of the three at age 8, went on to explain the grisly details while the twins nodded in agreement. All of them had seen healthy lungs and a smoker’s lungs preserved in liquid during health classes. That’s what they said, anyway. The healthy lungs, they told me, were pink and glowed with health. The other lungs, well, they were black as charred wood and clearly useless to their former owner.
Yuck. Gross. Why do kids have to see such things in their health classes? I should complain. And, even worse, why do I have to know about it? Now, I call quitting my smoking addiction after 26 years the best single thing I ever did for my health — and the health of my family. Then, I had called it something else. Their words weren’t enough to make me stop smoking on the spot. The smoke kept rising from my lips for months, never in the house, but often in the family minivan as I ferried the kids to and from school, activities, play dates.
I lied to my husband, Brian, about smoking in the van. I tried to throw my butts out the driver’s side window before anyone at my destination saw me. I preferred the risk of starting a fire alongside the road with a burning butt to being seen with my increasingly socially unacceptable addiction. By December, I thought, enough was enough. I began to let myself think about quitting. I had smoked since I was 19 years old and worked in a convenience store where most people bought cigarettes. I figured the customers must enjoy them since they kept coming back for more. I tried them, but I didn’t inhale, not at first anyway.
Twenty-six years later and I was constantly coughing up green stuff and starting to feel out of breath just walking up a flight of stairs. I was sick off and on every winter with bronchitis. I pictured my grandfather and my uncle, one of whom had died of emphysema, a slow strangling that took years, and the other of lung cancer, a quicker, but no more comfortable way to go that took about a year. I woke up at night coughing. I started carrying cough drops around with me. Once, I suffered such a severe case of bronchitis that a doctor at a minor emergency clinic said I would feel just as sick all the time in five, no, six years if I didn’t quit. That scared me, so I smoked more, not less. I don’t know why.
I can't plead ignorance about the dangers of smoking. I knew lung cancer was the No. 1 cancer killer in the nation and in Idaho. After all, I was the health reporter for the Idaho Statesman for years, until I quit to raise my family. (Colleen now works for the Statesman part time, reporting on health for the daily newspaper, as well as writing stories for Idaho Health.)
OK, enough already. I could quit. I had a lot of experience quitting. At least a dozen times in as many years I had thrown out my cigarettes, wetting them down in the kitchen sink, breaking them into pieces and burying them in the reeking bottom of the garbage can in the garage. Within a few hours, a day at most, I retrieved them, dried them in the sun, taped them back together and smoked them, just one or two at first and then, greedily, as many as I could salvage. After all, if I didn’t go buy a new pack, I could convince myself that I was still going to quit. I was an addict in denial.
On Jan. 11, 2006, I underwent hypnosis to try to stop. It was about the only thing I hadn’t tried yet. The patch, the gum, a quit-smoking class — none of it made any difference. I smoked and chewed nicotine gum. I smoked while wearing one or more patches. I had tried to quit and failed dozens of times. The hypnosis was not like at the Western Idaho Fair, where you can choose to make a fool of yourself in front of an audience when a hypnotist says you are a chicken or a movie star, and you believe him.
No, during this hypnosis, I laid down, closed my eyes and, under the instruction of medical psychologist Michael McClay, pictured myself walking down marble stairs at a fancy hotel at the beach. Strangely, that’s about the last thing I remember about the one hypnosis session, except that McClay told me I hated the smell of cigarette smoke, and after that, I did. It made me feel ill. The session lasted an hour, maybe, and cost $75.
McClay told me the hypnosis wouldn’t dissolve all my cravings, but would make them manageable enough to resist. I guess so. After I went home, I wanted a cigarette, and I wanted it now. I wanted a dozen cigarettes to smoke at the same time. But I didn’t. I really didn’t. I craved cigarettes, but cravings did not get the best of me.
The second day wasn’t quite so bad, and the third day was ever so slightly better, although I kept unconsciously reaching for my lighter whenever I felt tense about something, and for me that was a lot. Anyway, you get the idea. I did it. I really did it. I could hardly believe it. A week went by. Then two. I hopped on a treadmill that had been gathering dust in our basement for five years and walked for 10 minutes before stopping, exhausted. Over months, I increased my speed and time on the treadmill, mainly for something to do when the kids were driving me crazy and I wanted to drive to the convenience store that’s very close to our house to buy cigarettes.
After about six months, I could run five miles almost every day without stopping. I felt like an Olympic contender. I stopped coughing. I liked myself. I could hear the Olympic theme playing in the background even though I was only watching "Oprah" or the "Today" show on TV as I ran. It was a substitute addiction, but I have an addictive personality, and I could do worse. I loved the natural chemicals my body made before and after running. I liked the movement of my own body. And running never was going to give me cancer.
I had energy for the first time in 26 years. My husband and kids were proud of me. I was proud of me. I could work outside in the yard all day, trimming bushes, sweeping pine cones off the driveway, weeding the garden. I kept up with the kids.
I felt like a Superwoman version of myself. This time, there is no turning back.
