How I Quit Smoking and Lived To Tell About It

I began smoking when I was 13 years old: horrifically shocking now, for a respectable girl from the right side of the tracks, with two parents in the home, a stable family income, and the standard nod to the caveats of the Ten Commandments. But such behavior was not unusual in the 1950s, as I and my contemporaries, all wanting desperately to appear mature and glamorous—or, in the case of the boys, handsome and reckless—adopted the habits of our beloved movie stars, the icons who were our true role models and who smoked like chimneys.

I took to smoking like a baby to candy. Cigarettes never made me feel sick—to the contrary, they filled me with a fabulous feeling of good health, as I sucked the smoke deep into my lungs and savored the feel of the nicotine streaming through my waiting body, revving me up so that I seemed incredibly intelligent, filled with energy, ready to tackle any and all obstacles. Smoking cigarettes gave me something else nearly as valuable: an arsenal of objects with which to gain time to be clever and amusing; removing the pack, fondling the cigarette, finding the lighter, putting all the elements together and taking that first, thrilling drag.

As the years passed, I became more and more addicted, smoking more and more cigarettes, while some not-so-funny things began to happen: Friends of my parents, and then of mine, began to die of lung cancer. Breast cancer. Cancers of the liver, pancreas and bones. Mumblings were heard about cigarettes causing cancer, emphysema, strokes, heart attacks. Finally, in the mid-1960s, the Surgeon General declared that cigarette smoking was bad for your health. And later, that it had been shown to cause cancer. And these warnings were printed on cigarette packages and in advertisements. Finally, the government decreed that cigarettes could not be advertised on television, the hot communication medium of the moment, and the game was up.

Or so it seemed. Many of my smoking relatives and friends quit, and most of those quitters made it sound easy: “Oh, I just threw them away one day, and that was that.” Those of us who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or who had thrown them away one day to find that that was definitely not that, became pariahs, banished from homes and then restaurants, consigned to huddle outside in all kinds of inclement weather in miserable, guilty groups. We were criticized, harangued, shunned, embarrassed and scorned, and when our young children, sobbing, came home from school to plead with us to stop smoking before we died, we all began trying to quit.

And thus began my purgatory. I was in the process of quitting smoking for nearly 10 years! First, I “threw them away one day.” And then another day, and another, and another, until I realized this would never work. Then I began to limit myself, keeping the cigarettes in my glove compartment, never smoking at home so as to avoid my sobbing children, allowing myself one cigarette every 30 minutes or hour, until I realized that this too would never work. Then I went to Smoke Stoppers, Smoke Enders, The Schick Stop Smoking Plan (a torturous, disgusting avoidance-type behavior therapy that promised “your money back if you start again” from which I promptly got a refund) and a few other schemes designed to help people stop smoking. All, for a couple of days, “worked,” but soon enough I could not concentrate, could not sleep, could not work, could not remain married, could not effectively parent my children, could not seem to walk across a room without tripping and falling.

But I kept trying, and learned to my surprise that this is the secret: It seems that the more times one attempts to quit smoking, the better are the chances that one will, one day, succeed. By the time nicotine gum hit the market, I was able to substitute that for most of my cigarettes. When I did smoke, it was outside, having eliminated by steps the bedroom, the living room, and finally the entire indoor world of home and office. I then realized that smoking cigarettes was inextricably bound into every act of my life. As I came to the end of a line on a typewriter or computer, I automatically reached for a cigarette. When I answered the phone, my hand shot out to light one. After I’d put mascara on one eye, I moved to my left, where an ashtray had been stationed for years, for a puff on a burning cigarette. Get in the car? Light a cigarette. Put the car in gear? Take another puff. And on and on and on, my every action controlled by this most banal and insidious, lethal addiction.

Finally, came the sunshine-filled day we held a big family birthday party, the house filled with small children, and I sat outside, alone on the patio, smoking as I watched through the closed glass doors all the beautiful children I was protecting by my absence. I felt so terrible in my isolation that I did something that was then for me uncharacteristic: I began to pray for help, for something to put an end to this misery. Three days later I smoked my last cigarette and put my seat in a chair at a local meeting of a national 12-step program called Smokers Anonymous. Bolstered by my many sincere but failed attempts to quit, my path to freedom from nicotine began there. I have not had a cigarette for nearly 16 years.

I am convinced that if I could stop smoking, you can stop smoking. It is exceedingly difficult, probably one of the hardest things you will ever do. You cannot do it for anyone but yourself, and you must care enough for yourself to be willing to endure however many attempts it takes you to succeed. I wish you much courage and the will to thrive. Most of all, I wish you success in beating the demon. I would love to hear your stories.

Ed’s Note: For more on how to quit smoking, see the article in this month’s edition of Fit for Life in EMS.