No More Smoking, I Mean It, Really!

By Jill Montgomery

I quit smoking six months ago.

I haven’t said much on the subject to anyone for fear of jinxing the whole attempt. Part of me feels like standing in the middle of the street yelling, "Yahoo, I did it, I got the monkey off my back. I have extra money every week that I can blow on wild living!" Okay, in reality I usually spend the money on bills or help cover the higher cost of gas for my van, but I could spend it on wild living!

I don’t say anything because inside my head is this little voice that says, "You’ve done it before, six months is nothing, you’ve quit for a year before…three times."

And the voice is right. I have, as have most of the other millions of people who have quit for a long spell of time, gotten "sucked" (pun intended), into the whole cigarette habit again.

It’s way easier to go back to smoking than it is to quit. Just one drag in a moment of stress, or when a good friend has one going or any other little excuse and the memory of that feeling of relaxation comes back. You know that feeling, when you have that first cigarette of the day…or right after a meal, or headed down the road and there is nothing to do with the non-driving hand besides hold a cigarette…

Whoa, excuse me while I go get a life saver and get a grip.

What helps keep me on the straight and narrow now that I have quit, though I still get the urge to light up at odd moments, is, I can now walk two and a half miles at a stretch without putting in an emergency call for an oxygen delivery. I can now taste my food, which explains the walks every night as I try to lose the added weight. And the doctors were right, my sinus infections are fewer and the headaches less frequent, even in this summer of humid, wet weather.

Also, my clothes, car and house smell a lot better. I will admit, though, the driving force behind my determination to quit smoking was stubbornness. If other people could kick the habit, so could I!

I sympathize with people that are trying to quit and struggling. For what it’s worth, here’s my advice!

Don’t quit trying to quit. It will work, sooner or later, honest. In my situation a bad case of pneumonia solidified my desire to quit. I had been planning to quit for around six months and had in fact already cut down on the amount of cigarettes I smoked in a day, but pneumonia in some strange way proved to be a blessing. It’s hard to get a really good drag off a cigarette if you can’t even draw a deep breath!

Don’t be afraid to get help. Use the patch, talk to other quitters on the phone, join a group, do whatever it takes. Stay busy; the saying "Idle hands are the devil’s workshop" was invented by a smoker. I have rearranged all the furniture in my house, taken up cross stitch embroidery, and walked, walked, walked.

And at the end of six months or a year, take the money you would have spent on smoking and take yourself on vacation. Go some place exotic where they have drinks with umbrellas, or hike to the top of a mountain or go on vacation with your whole family and get a good look at why you quit.

You can do it.

Jill Montgomery and family live in Braintree where the air is just a little sweeter these days. Jill is closing in on the seven month mark.

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