Want Some More Good Reasons to Quit

This was posted right after I quit ...only one post from this soul...not sure what happened but it sure made an impact on me... Name was Alamich...only one post...guess she gave up..she may never know how this inspired me at day 10October 17, 2007 I am 38 years old and I have been smoking regularly since I was 18,stop smoking now, sneaking cigarettes once in a while from age 12 on didn't really count, I thought. Around a pack and a half a day. I smoked through all 3 of my pregnancies with the rationalization that my mom smoked while carrying ME, so it would be fine. All of my babies were big and healthy, so I felt vindicated. My first son would get croup and asthma-like illnesses, I'm sure it was from his father and I smoking in the house, in the car.. everywhere. Never really occurred to me back then though. When it did, I just shut it out of my mind. By the time my second son was born, with a new husband, I had graduated to still smoking in the house, but with a fan blowing out the window and blowing into the fan. Or going down "into the basement" (standing at the basement door in the kitchen acting like there was some smoke-sucking monster down at the bottom of the stairs who would magically grab all the smoke out of my kitchen and dispose of it for me) As time went on, we went outside to smoke more and more. We had a bathroom that we locked ourselves into to smoke and one day, one of us took a mop, dampened the head, and made a streak across the ceiling. It was amazing. That's when we started heading outside, but we'd cheat in winter by smoking in the house.. but smoking really fast to get it over with and not smoke up the house too much. Yeah. When I had my 3rd child, our daughter, we were still mostly smoking outside but still smoking in the car...with the windows open, holding the cigarette close to the cracked window and trying to exhale through the crack as well. Not only did this put our kids at risk of having a red hot cherry blown back into their faces, but they also got to enjoy the bitter cold in the mornings "Mom.. it's snowing in my face, are you done smoking YET?" "Mom, it's RAINING out there, I'm getting soaked! PLEASE shut the window!" I'd holler back "It's only cracked, not THAT much rain is getting in! Sheesh, fine, I'll put it out." And then I'd put it out and feel a mixture of guilt that I couldn't wait until we got to our destination to smoke, and a feeling of "Damnit, I wasn't done yet!" There was an incident with our middle son when he was a baby, where he ran into my husband's cigarette and got a large hot ash in his eye. I remember him screaming in pain all the way to the hospital and my crying while trying to comfort him on the ride. I remember looking at that beautiful blue eye and it was completely black, full of ash, and how terrifying it was. My husband lost it in the bathroom and I had to step up and be the only adult. It was a horrible time. His eye is fine now, he's 9 with no long term effects or scarring, but just through pure luck. We both tried to quit together in the fall of 2002. We lasted around 3 days, I think, and then my husband decided that he was going to have a cigar. His rationalization was that having a cigar wasn’t really smoking since he didn’t inhale, and he ALWAYS had a cigar in Fall. I called him a cheater and a liar, said “Screw it” and started smoking again. Of course, we both did. I’ve had pneumonia, bronchitis, breathing treatments, inhalers. I’ve been hospitalized and on an IV and walked outside of hospitals, dragging my IV behind me, wearing nothing but a gown and maybe socks.. to have a cigarette. I’d then shuffle back to my hospital room, coughing and hacking. In the last ten years, I’ve gained 30 lbs. My teeth are yellow, my fingers would stink, the price of cigarettes has gone up to from $4.50 to over 5 bucks a pack here, and I ran out of excuses. My daughter was the catalyst. She is 5, incredibly clever, and holds my heart firmly in her little hands. She would pepper me with questions and I would give her the stock answers that I gave her siblings earlier,smoking cessation, the same ones my mom had given me when I begged HER to stop smoking and I was a little girl. I think we all know the excuses and the hypocrisy of telling our children that what WE are doing is a horrible nasty thing and THEY must never do it, and that they just can’t possibly understand the addiction and how HARD it is for us to quit… so they’re best off just never ever even trying it and not ending up doomed and addicted like Mommy. My quit date was October 2nd, 2007. I’m on Chantix, and it really has helped the cravings. The very important thing for me right now is that this is for me. I cannot be dependant on whether or not my husband quits. I want to be at my children’s graduations and weddings and the births of my grandchildren without coughing, hacking, stinking and maybe dragging an oxygen bottle around. Also, importantly, when those days DO come when my job as Mom has evolved into something way less hands-on, then I am really looking forward to discovering me, and my life, and seeing things I have always wanted to see. My mom died suddenly from a brain aneurysm last October 12th, 2006. She was only 57. She was a chronic smoker and had COPD, a purse full of inhalers, lozenges and Advair, but it was the hidden secret flaw lurking in her brain that snuck up and snuffed out any more chances she had. I could die like that. Fall from my chair on one day and my children could be deciding what to do with my organs the next. That would be fine compared to a long drawn out self-inflicted suffocation that I would be gifting myself with in my future if I kept smoking. So I’m clean for 15 days now. My husband is still smoking. I don’t have the energy to deal with him and whether or not he’s going to quit, but there’s no smoking either of our cars, now nor the house, so it’s just the garage that’s stinky and occasionally he’ll smoke in one of the bathrooms when he’s having his morning "sabbatical". I can’t take responsibility for the health and welfare of 3 kids, fighting a horrible addiction for myself, and then topping it with whether or not he’s strong enough to do it. I do get a chuckle when he’s the one who’s got to run for cigarettes now, we used to pull names out of a hat when neither one wanted to go do it. He’ll be the one standing outside in the snow this winter sucking one down before we drive home, I’ll be able to sit in the nice toasty car, watch him, and be glad it’s not me. When my friend talks about taking a train trip from Michigan to California, no longer will I have a clinching in my gut when I think about how it would be to be on a train that long without smoking, how I’d be able to get off the train to smoke, etc. Heck, right now with the money I’m saving from not buying smokes, it’ll make that train trip just that much easier to afford if it comes to fruition. My smoking calculator says I have saved $120.00 and that’s in just a little over 2 weeks. Can you believe that? I spent THAT much money on something that was poisoning me? I am such an idiot. Or was. I’m trying not to be now. Going to the gym helps as well. I went every day for a while but my daughter had a cold and I either got her cold, or my body’s draining from quitting, or both, and I haven’t felt like working out the last few days. I miss it though, and it’s funny because I was such a sloth and so happy to just sit on my ass getting fat when I was smoking, I stop, and suddenly I have energy and want to become active again. I had no idea that smoking was holding me down so much. That’s all for now.