Is There Life After Smoking?

As I stumbled my way through last week in a zombie-like state of nicotine deprivation, I knew, at least intellectually, that it was a temporary condition. Many of my friends have quit smoking. They all live what appear to be normal lives. Quite similar to the lives they had before they quit, actually.

Unfortunately, intellectual knowledge is useless in situations involving emotional discomfort. Emotions are processed by the limbic brain, an ancient neural structure inherited from our earliest mammalian ancestors who spent their short and terrified lives scurrying up trees to avoid being stepped on by a passing stegosaurus. It’s no use telling the limbic brain: This too shall pass. The limbic brain has no sense of time, it lives in an eternal now. The concept of future is only understood by the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, a much more recent addition to the mammalian mental landscape.

So last week, even with ample proof that life after smoking is not only possible but highly likely, I could not imagine my own survival. I slumped in my easy chair for hours, listlessly flipping through channels, wallowing in ludicrous amounts of self pity and wondering why all daytime television now revolves around home renovations, cheating boyfriends and cranky judges.

Then yesterday, totally by accident, I finally had my first emotional breakthrough in my quest for quality of life as a non-smoker.  

When cravings overtake me, one of my coping mechanisms is walking. Some days I’ve had to take two or three walks. Fortunately I live in an area that offers a plethora of poddling possibilities, (I know! But for some reason, I feel alliterative today.) and the weather has been cooperating nicely with March going out like a lamb this year. Yesterday’s first walk took me down to the river, where the resident duck population was engaged in its annual reproductive frenzy. Courting couples careened (I know! Sorry about that.) around the grassy part of the riverbank. One highly frustrated drake attacked my foot, which looked nothing like a lady duck, so I can only assume he had a shoe fetish.

On my second walk, in an attempt to avoid amorous avian advances (I know! This one is particularly horrible, isn’t it?), I decided to turn inland, a direction I haven’t taken lately due to the number of convenience stores in my neighborhood. I walked south first, because:

a)   there is a particularly beautiful garden attached to an old Georgian house that I like to check out

and

b)   the two other directions that didn’t involve horny ducks would have meant climbing a hill or passing the convenience store across the street.

Nothing in the garden appeared to be sprouting yet, so I crossed the main road and turned into a quiet subdivision of brick bungalows built (I know! I wonder if all this alliteration has anything to do with quitting smoking?) not long after the second world war. Instantly, I remembered the last time I walked here—on my way to the convenience store by the bridge where they sell my favorite brand of gummi bears as well as cigarettes. Gut clenching with the craving for nicotine, I scurried down a street I’d never been on before, which led to the park beside the canal where frenzied waterfowl literally littered the landscape. (I know! I can’t stop them. Just try to ignore them.)

At this point, I had three choices:

1.    I could retrace my steps, but that would mean passing the convenience store.

2.    I could walk through the ducks, but that might result in another sexual assault on my foot.

3.    I could climb and descend the steep hill between the canal and the main road.

My gut admonished me: “Don’t give in now, you fool!”

My foot protested vehemently: “Absolutely not!”

My knees sighed, “Oh crap!” and we started up the hill.

Well! It turns out hill-climbing is much easier when it is done quickly, something I could never manage when I smoked. I won’t say the climb was painless, but it was over long before the pain became unbearable. I stood at the top of the hill, looking down the slope to the main road, and for a brief moment, the happiness of my accomplishment outweighed the grinding misery of withdrawal.

Today, of course, I’m back to obsessing about nicotine. But I now have emotional proof there will be life after smoking, and happy hours of hiking up high hills will help it happen. (I know! They’re getting worse. I think I’d better stop now.)

47 days, 23 hours, 22 minutes and 47 seconds

I am attempting to quit smoking. I’ve tried to quit many times in my life. Most of them didn’t last more than a few hours, but three of them almost succeeded.

The first almost success happened in my twenties, although I have no idea how long I remained on the wagon because I didn’t actually realize I’d stopped smoking until a co-worker who sat beside me at work and also smoked, asked me why I’d quit. In those days, we could smoke at our desks and she thought it had been at least a month since she’d seen me light up.

In my forties, an asthma attack brought on by an especially bad year for filbert pollen made it impossible to smoke for three weeks. Taking advantage of this abstinence I lasted for seven months until I repeatedly locked myself out of my apartment late at night. I’d sit on the steps outside my apartment and think about smoking, but of course my money was locked inside along with my keys. One night, I took out the garbage just after midnight and locked myself out again. When I sat on the steps, the change in my jeans pocket jingled. I pulled it out, counted it, then walked to an all-night convenience store for a pack of Marlboros and a lighter.

The last attempt, in my fifties, came after six days in hospital for another bout of bronchitis-related asthma and lasted about three months. I’d just put my house on the market, in preparation for moving to India. Two months after the house sold, I handed in my notice at work, initiating a tornado of anxiety about quitting my job with no prospect of future employment that finally culminated in mad dash to the gas station one Sunday morning.

So I thought this current attempt, triggered by another bout of bronchitis related asthma, would be a breeze, or at least no more than strong wind, because it was so similar to my last semi-successful attempts. I had recent memory of breathing difficulty and was already unemployed with no plans to sell my house, so there was no additional stress in my life.

I gave up drinking to prevent myself from losing control while under the influence with no ill effects at all—other than boredom; sobriety is not my ideal state.  I hid a house key outside in what I hoped was a not-too-obvious location and papered the house with signs like HANG IN THERE! and YOU CAN DO IT!  cribbed from the wrappers of motivational cough drops. Since my previous attempts had been hijacked by failure of will-power, I drew up a reduction chart, limiting myself to fewer and fewer cigarettes each day, hoping an accumulation of small triumphs of will-power would make the day I arrived at zero easier.

Here’s what I learned on day zero: I had no problem enduring the shakes, the headache, the stomach cramps, the cravings and the crankiness. In many ways, the challenge of surviving these symptoms of detoxification bolstered my determination.

Here’s what I learned on day zero plus one: headache, cramps and cravings got worse. Shakes became intermittent. Crankiness faded into a grayish state of apathy. I played at least a hundred games of solitaire on the computer.

Here’s what I learned on day zero plus two: headache got even worse. Shakes reduced to trembles. Stomach cramps were replaced by a strange sensation in my chest, like a spasm of every muscle in my torso, which woke me up at two AM and had the beneficial effect of converting the apathy into mild speculation about whether or not I was having a coronary event. But since I remained alert and mobile and normal-colored, I decided it was probably just another withdrawal symptom.

Here’s what I learned on day zero plus three: Headache still present, but so familiar I didn’t notice it unless I thought about it. All cramping, spasming and shaking ceased. Apathy still present but now punctuated by flashes of joy when I thought about buying cigarettes.

At six PM on day zero plus three, I gave in, bought cigarettes and smoked two in a row in an ecstasy of re-nicification. At seven PM on day zero plus three, when the high subsided, I realized my quitting plan was missing a vital ingredient: the desire to quit.

Now as it happens, the regulations for cigarette packaging recently changed in Canada, and the pack that I bought was in the new format, complete with a disturbing picture of a 42-year-old lung cancer patient, still smoking, and a testimonial she wrote just before she died, urging smokers to visit www.smokershelpline.ca. Not being one to ignore a sign, I hightailed it over to the website the next day, where I found a mass of testimonials from successful quitters.

I read through them, looking for motivations to ignite my desire to quit. Children and grandchildren figured prominently as primary motivators. I don’t have any of those. Many people felt embarrassed by their habit and disliked themselves for smoking in secret. I’ve always been a public smoker. Some people didn’t like the smell or the taste. Again, not applicable to me. However, a number of people said they found the determination to quit by imagining how much longer they’d live and how much healthier they feel while doing it. Well hell. Who doesn’t want to live longer and feel better?

I created a new set of motivational signs to replace the generic encouragement, this time focused on the quality of my longer life. I held a little ceremony, breaking the remaining cigarettes in the pack one at a time while chanting Mr. Spock’s traditional greeting, “Live long and prosper.” I brushed my teeth three times in a row (another activity many quitters found helpful) and embarked upon my second attempt. I held out for two days, with reduced withdrawal symptoms, before breaking down last night and toddling across the street just before the convenience store closed.

This morning, I decided I to join the Connect to Quit program on www.smokershelpline.ca, hoping that following all the steps and joining the support forum would give me the impetus I needed to resist the lure of the demon nicotine. The first step was to fill out my smoking profile. When I finished, the website told me how much money I would save a year and how much longer I would have to enjoy the money I saved, which turns out to be 47 days, 23 hours, 22 minutes and 47 seconds.

Okay, that’s not a terribly long time. But I’ll still feel better, right? Hopefully in less than a month and a half. Because if I don’t, and this third attempt fails, I’m not sure what I’ll use as motivation for the next one.

Miss Sweden

I got sick last week. I’m on the mend now, but while I was ill, I was forced to spend several days doing as little as possible because the medication blurred my vision and gave me the shakes. I couldn’t watch television, or write, or read. The only source of amusement left to me was the inside of my head.

I got to wondering, as we do when we are ill and feeling more mortal than usual, whether or not I am satisfied with the life I have now. Certainly, this is not the life I dreamed about back in my twenties. For one thing, I never imagined I'd get to this age. I expected to die young and leave a not unattractive corpse, which is one of the reasons I was reluctant to own a cat until I got older and uglier. Being found sprawled out on the living room carpet with my face eaten half off would have spoiled the effect entirely. Now, of course, I could safely leave behind any number of starving moggies to improve my esthetic legacy.

Sprawled in my easy chair, dozing and pondering, I suddenly remembered Miss Sweden.

For a brief period in my twenties, I lived in a high rise apartment building on the Danforth in Toronto. Back then, my section of the Danforth was a street of small family-owned shops and restaurants. Every Saturday morning, I took my string shopping bags and toddled along the sidewalk, visiting the vegetable vendor, the butcher, the fabric store, the bakery, and the store of stuff from Finland. I never bought anything in that store, but it fascinated me.

On my travels, I frequently ran across Miss Sweden. I don’t know how old she was—in my twenties anyone over forty seemed old—but she was probably younger than I am now. Her hair was a shade of solid yellow I’d only ever seen on boxes of Nice-N-Easy and she wore it piled on top of her head in an elaborate beehive of sausage curls. She drew her eyebrows high on her forehead in black pencil and over-painted her imploded lips in a crimson cupid bow, creating the effect of perpetual surprise. Huge gold earrings swayed at the ends of her stretched earlobes. She frequently showed up in the grocery store wearing a pink chenille bathrobe over pink flannel pajamas and fuzzy pink slippers, the entire ensemble topped off by a frayed  and grubby satin band slung from shoulder to hip that read MISS SWEDEN in lovely gothic lettering.

When I encountered Miss Sweden, I went out of my way to avoid her. She frightened me, the way she lived in a self-defined universe, divorced from the petty conformities of conventional behavior. She seemed feral, as though refusing to recognize public opinion existed. Perhaps she was crazy, but she was happy and harmless and somehow magnificent as well.

With a few exceptions, I’ve decided my life right now is better than I expected it would be. Because like Miss Sweden, I am also living in a self-defined universe, actively pursuing what pleases me, vigorously avoiding what does not. Although far from feral, I’ve finally learned not to be overly concerned by what other people think, and this has had a liberating effect on my choices.

I wish I’d understood about Miss Sweden sooner. I wish I’d talked to her, learned the story behind her beauty queen sash, found out why she lived in her pajamas, and if she really was crazy, or, as I now suspect, just incredibly wise.