Dear Santa….. scratch the ciggies…..

bristolstopsmoking.nhs.uk

Remeber I put ciggies on my Christmas list….

well forget it. I’ve quit.

Yep….. me….. I quit…… I know you’ve heard this a million times before, but seriously….. I am NOT a smoker. In fact I never was…. I think I was just having a little rebellious streak and experimenting. It wasn’t for me. I’m over it now. I don’t need the magic stop smoking pills either.

I have tried every method of quitting smoking in the past. I did the patches, the inhalators, the e-Cigarettes, I even tried hypnotherapy. I don’t actually find quitting smoking hard. It’s staying quit that’s hard. The first 3 days are tough, then I break at the 6 week or 3 month mark. The smallest, stupidest thing can make me feel a bit stressed and one little puff turns into a whole ciggie, then the next day I convince myself it’s just one to relax, then it’s a couple and then it’s “Well, I can’t waste the pack now so I may as well smoke them”, and the next thing I know I am smoking again.

dent.osu.edu

At one point I even had a “Stop Smoking Counsellor”. They were funny. I had to go and meet with them once a week and “talk through” my smoking issues. In fact the first time I went to meet this person, my Oldest Bestie (long time childhood friend not oldest as in age) was with me. She came in and I had to use all my powers not to burst out laughing in this person’s face….. Bestie was sat behind her in the room sniggering and all I wanted to do was keel over and bust out laughing too. You might be wondering what could be so funny but here’s the deal;

guardian.co.uk

Firstly, my “Stop Smoking Counsellor” turns up 20 minutes late at our agreed meet spot. For some reason we had to meet in a really seedy part of town. Hence why Bestie came along. So we’re standing there outside said meeting building and we’re smoking…. after all…. it’s going to be my last right? There’s this hideous rumbling noise coming from down the hill and I could not tell if it was a man or a woman, but someone was flying up the hill on a HUGE Harley Davidson motorbike with tassels flying off their jacket behind them. No… it can’t be…. surely not…… “Hi there….. you here for the smoking clinic?” this voice says to me as they pull up by my feet. Notice I haven’t genderised this person yet….. I still wasn’t sure if this was a man or a woman. The voice and body frame and clothing gave NOTHING away. The facial hair was also quite ominous. A hand reached out to me and the voice said, “I’m Maureen, do come in”. Ok, so it was a woman. a scary looking, 25st worth of woman. YES 25st, you heard me right…. that’s 350lbs…. 159 KILOS!!!! Great…. if she can’t whip me into not smoking, no one can.

smokerelief.co.uk

Maureen (who’s name I have changed) went through all the reasons why I smoke with me and applauded me for being very self aware. Surely most people know why they smoke? Well at the end of the day, these were my top reasons.

1. I enjoy it
2. It signifies a little break from reality
3. I enjoy it

Anyways….. back to Bestie sitting in the background sniggering. Maureen, all 30st of her (notice her weight went up… it was all I could think about sitting there looking at her and her facial hair…. gosh she had alot of thick hairs sticking out of her chin and upper lip), was giving me ideas for things I could do when I wanted to have a cigarette. Now having determined that I mainly smoke to escape from stresses of single parenting…. i.e. you walk in the living room to find that the walls have been drawn on, the sofa is covered in food and there;s chocolate milk spilt over the beige carpet and you run away to have a ciggie rather than kill someone or at the very least scream till you’re blue in the face and the kids are frightened beyond their wits ends….. Maureen gives me these tips….

1. 

   tvtropes.org

   Have a shower every time I feel like that (was this woman crazy? I can hardly have a shower uninterrupted as it is or for more than 30 seconds….. where the hell was I going to find the time to shower 20 times a day) *SCRATCH*

2. Keep a box of chocolates on hand and have one every time I feel like having a ciggie. Maureen divulged that she used to smoke and this strategy worked for her. (This is where I nearly burst out laughing. Bestie was sitting behind her in direct eye contact with me sniggering. WTH was wrong with this woman? She wants me to quit smoking but substitute for chocolate so I can balloon to what I now thought was more like 32st, grow some facial hair and a deep voice and what??? I was going to be healthier? Hell no Lady Friend….. How in God’s name did this woman think that being MORBIDLY obese was healthier than being a smoker. Surely they are on par…. they both lead to death. So sorry Maureen…… *SCRATCH*

Maureen packed me off with a load of nicotine replacement patches and other paraphernalia and I had to go see her every week to collect more of it as well as talk through how my non smoking was going. This was quite succesful for a few months, mainly because I was so intrigued with how this woman kept trying to shove chocolate down me and I was determined to show her that you didn’t need chocolate or to put on loads of weight….. maybe Maureen was right though….. I lasted about 3 months and then I stopped going and blocked her calls. Jeeze… she was persistent. She just kept calling and calling and kept trying to make me come back. Trouble was though….. I enjoy smoking.

Don’t get me wrong. I know all the reasons why I shouldn’t smoke…..

1. 

   bestcigsonline.blogspot.com

   I want to live and be healthy.

2. I want to smell nice.
3. I want to save money.
4. Ironically, I know that smoking though used to decrease stress actually makes me more stressed cause I am always trying to figure out how and when I can go have that ciggie break.
5. I don’t want my kids to smoke.
6. I have way more time and am more productive when not always rewarding myself with stupid ciggie breaks.

Anyways, I have stopped smoking now and want to apologise to Santa.

SANTA….. I’m sorry…. I BELEIVE!!!!

You do make dreams come true! But did it have to be like this?

Be careful what you wish for cause I sure got my wish. Of all the ways I have ever tried to stop smoking, this was the easiest and most effective, so I will share my secret with you. For FREE. Forget all these programmes where they charge you $39.99 a month for ten million months or your money back…. guaranteed…. this one is sure to work….

You may have noticed you didn’t hear from me in a while right? Last time was my Christmas list where I asked for ciggies or a magic pill to make me stop smoking. Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t want the ciggies really, I wanted to quit. I’ve been trying rather unsuccessfully for quite sometime. Here’s the deal though……

Now if you remember correctly, I also had on my list some sore throat spray. I’d had a headache a few days before. But one of the rules of being a single parent is that you’re not allowed to fall ill…. so I ignored it. But that sore throat…. that was hard to ignore. It was like I had razor blades in my throat for a few days. Instinct must have kicked in because I went to the grocery a couple of days early and stocked up on ready meals and soups and stuff that was easy to prepare. I did what I refer to as a “lazy shop”. Literally the next morning, I was flat out in bed with full blown flu. That darn sore throat turned into aches, pains, sweats, some serious inability to even get myself out of bed and into a shower or to the toilet to relieve myself and if that wasn’t bad enough. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t keep my eyes open for very long, I may as well have been in a coma. I was useless…… except that…… yep….. I managed to have a ciggie.

zedge.net

Can you imagine? How desperate is that? I was sooooooo ill and could not perform the most basic of functions, I had a cough from hell and was practically coughing out little parts of lung tissue, my sinuses were infected and burning and I certainly had a respiratory tract infection…… but I was managing to drag myself out for a cigarette every now and again. Of course I was also fooling myself into thinking that it was making me feel better! Told myself they were clearing my airways and giving me enough energy to cook some food for the kids. Yeah right…. but you know what….. The darn things…. THEY RAN OUT!

Of course I could not send the children to get me a pack now could I? And seriously. I was that ill. I couldn’t dress myself or even walk the 300 yards to the store to buy a pack. So I went without. I had no choice…. and trust me…. on top of flu, coughing, spluttering, worrying about whether the kids have managed to feed themselves and dismissed teeth brushing as being completely inconsequential at a time like this, the last thing I needed was withdrawal symptoms. Maybe it was a blessing though. I was too ill to care or to notice the difference between the withdrawal symptoms and what I was now considering to be a case of fatal Bird Flu. Never in my life have I felt so ill.

So here I am… over a week later and I have managed to get out of bed for a few hours. I have not managed to leave the house yet, except for a doctor’s appointment earlier today. He was listening to my chest and asked “Do you still smoke?”…. “Hell no!” I responded instantly…. This man. He knows me well. He turned and looked at me through slitty eyes and said quietly “So when exactly did you stop?”….. I turned and looked at the eye chart, pretending to test my vision and muttered as quietly as I could, “Oh, I dunno, sometime last week when I ran out but I was too sick to go get anymore…. I think I may need an eye test by the way. Can we organise one of those?”

He offered me some patches to keep it up. I didn’t see the point though of putting nicotine back into my system. It’s been over a week as it is. Added to this….. my brush with death, and I still feel like I am dying…. the last thing I want is to feel like this again. THIS must be what LUNG CANCER feels like and I NEVER want to feel like this again.

wellnessofhealth.com

So….. the moral of the story is, I have tried every method possible of quitting smoking. Patches, inhalators, tablet type things, cold turkey and I know all the reasons WHY I smoke and why I SHOULDN’T. But this time…. mark my word…. this time, this is for good. So if you want to quit smoking too. Forget Allen Carr, forget hypnotherapy, nicotine replacement, counselling etc…… go get yourself a bout of flu. Preferably Swine Flu…. one that really knocks you out. Failing that, you could ask your GP to have you admitted into hospital and put you in a coma for a couple of weeks.

P.S. I am eating stacks of chocolate. However, the advantage of using my method of quitting smoking is that you get so ill, you’ve lost so much weight, you actually NEED the chocolate!