Words From the Porch

My One Year Ramble

It’s a little rough, but here it is…
Anne

This morning my QuitMeter turned over a year. A whole year. It hardly seems possible. For the last 12 months, I watched that tiny meter on my task bar slowly tick away the days, weeks, months, hours. Sometimes I turned the meter off and kept it hidden because it seemed that time stood still.

I smoked for 24 years, which is slightly more than half of my life. I don’t even remember why I started smoking. I know that I was well out of high school, where many a smoking habit was born. Smoking was accepted back then. Everyone smoked, or so it seemed, and those who didn’t seemed to care little that the rest of the world did. It was the 80’s, I was young and my life stretched before me to an infinite horizon. In the back of my mind was the vague notion that smoking was an unhealthy habit, but I figured there was plenty of time to quit. It never occurred to me that quitting smoking might be a hard thing to do.

Little by little, cigarettes became more than a casual habit. They became my life. Cigarettes were the perfect friend. When my boyfriend dumped me, cigarettes were there to commiserate. If a job was not going well, they were there to comfort me and prop me up during the hunt for a new job. When I got married, they celebrated with me; when the marriage ended, they consoled me late into the night. They got me through every milestone, good or bad. It didn’t matter, really, because there was plenty of time to quit.

Sometime in the early 1990s, I began to notice that there weren’t as many smokers as I remembered, and I began to have little pangs of guilt. After all, I had a young child. When my brother and his wife quit abruptly one day, with seemingly little problem, I panicked. They had both been heavy smokers. I felt strangely betrayed.

Thus began a series of half-hearted attempts to quit. My first attempt was cold turkey. I made it two days before the dizziness frightened me into a relapse. I knew nothing about the quitting process, only that people said it was hard. It seemed the successful quitters just tossed away their packs one day and thought nothing of it. Or so they would have liked me to believe.

My first serious quit lasted about 6 months. I used the patch, which was prescription only back then. In the third month, depression hit me hard. By the fourth month, I was sneaking a cigarette every couple of days, just enough to “take the edge off”. Really it was just enough to feed the addition. By the end of the sixth month, I was back to a pack a day.

By the year 2000, I was going out of my mind with a stop-start cycle. I would make a valiant attempt to quit, which typically lasted about three days, then I would cave in. One time I made it a month, but the depression that set in was too dark, too frightening, and I caved.

In retrospect, it would have made sense to try to combine the patch with Wellbutrin, but I was too ashamed to go back to my doctor and admit that I had become a closet smoker. As if that would come as a surprise. My blood pressure was sky high, my skin an ashen grey. I avoided having my picture taken because of the bags beneath my eyes. I looked like what I was — a junkie. I looked ten years older than my age. I was fooling no one but myself.

I had always been a bit on the heavy side, and at the age of 37, I started working out. I tried jogging. It burned off a lot of calories and made it easy to lose weight. But I could never get past a mile without feeling like my lungs were collapsing. I joked about one day entering a race, knowing full well the fruitlessness of that goal.

In May of 2004, a new neighbor asked if I would help her get through a 12-week introductory running program sponsored by our local running club. By now I was a closet smoker, smoking only at home or in my car, fooling myself into believing that I didn’t smoke “that much”. I agreed to commit to the program without really thinking about the impact this would have.

The first night, we were asked to run a timed mile. It was a hot evening, the sun was blazing down. After a half mile, I started coughing and wheezing. I thought I would pass out right there in front of hundreds of other novices.

It occurred to me that I had made a mistake in signing up. We were expected to follow a strict program that alternated walking and jogging, gradually increasing our distance each week. The culmination of the program was a 10k, or 6.2 mile, race in the sweltering August heat.

But something was different this time. The coughing made me angry about my nasty habit. I was sick of using the smoking as an excuse. And I was sick of feeling bad, of my lungs hurting, my skin looking bad, of stinking like an ashtray. I was sick of being enslaved by something I hated so much.

I threw on a patch the next morning and went out to meet my neighbor for a jog.

I incorporated yoga into my daily routine, always meditating to quiet my agitated mind. My mantra became “smoking is something I used to do.” I would repeat this over and over during urges to smoke, and little by little, the urges became less frequent and gentler. The urge became manageable.

As I had feared, depression set in around the third month. It was like a dark curtain blocking the view of the sun. Yoga and running and a hatred of being enslaved to a disgusting habit pushed me through, but I battled anxiety and mild panic attacks for months.

In Blairsville, I kept reading posts by the fogeys that said that it got better, a lot better. These were people who had stuck out their quits. I knew it was possible to feel better. I kept waiting for it to get better.

Sometime between the ninth and tenth months, it was as if a switch were flipped. The anxiety and depression melted away. My blood pressure dropped. A sense of overall calm and serenity prevailed. I was feeling better. My body was healing itself and returning to a state of normalcy. I was getting comfortable with being a nonsmoker.

I ran five races in my first year, some in sweltering heat, some in winter’s bitter cold. All of them were challenging. My times won’t make any record books, but I smile at every finish line. Every mile is more distance from my former self.

This summer I signed up to help coach novice runners for the same program, and last night I jogged slowly around the track with a group of new runners. One of them had the etched face of a smoker. It was easy to be extra encouraging for her. I saw myself in her.

This morning I stood at the end of my driveway waiting for my running partner, watching a pink and orange sunrise breach the eastern sky. The air was clear and sharp, the moon still hanging in the west. We made our customary four-mile loop at an easy pace, chatting about our children and the summer ahead. I love the freshness of the air and the feeling of being reborn.

I am starting to understand what the fogeys were talking about when they said it got better. A lot better. It’s still getting better. Any of you who are struggling in the early stages of a quit, believe me when I say that it is so worth it, the rewards are so great. Stick with it, no matter how bad it gets. Find a mantra, a healthy habit to replace the smoking. It is worth it, YOU are worth it.

Peace to all of you,
Anne