:). Love that my words might help in ways I hadn’t anticipated?

In mid 2013 I coughed and a disc in my lower back prolapsed, and it’s safe to say I’ve never known pain like it. Yet despite barely being able to move, needing to pee into a bucket and sleep on the couch I’d still slide my way to the fireplace for a cig, blowing the smoke up the chimney! With lots of physio and some painkilling injections it was coming along nicely. Then the disc below prolapsed. Injections did nothing so I was scheduled for surgery to shave the discs and for some scaffolding to support the vertebrae. It would involve 4 nights in hospital and several months off work so I resolved to stop smoking. When they have to warn you that general anaesthetic is more risky for smokers it starts to make sense. My mental preparation was in the right spot too. My father in particular has a bad cough. He can’t laugh without ending up in a fit of coughing. I was visiting one time when my sister happened to be there. She’s also a smoker and 7 years older than me. I heard her cough and she sounded just like my father and at that point it struck me that I didn’t have long before smoking caught up with me.

I went for surgery in February 2014, and I had an app that counts the days and adds up the money saved – based on the price of cigs on the day I stopped. I haven’t smoked since, not even a drag. Back then a pack was about £4.30; today I think about £7.00. According to the app it’s £6,127.50 that I haven’t spent on cigs over the 1425 days. Not money saved, naturally!

My MS was invisible up to that point, and the next few months were probably when it turned into progressive and really started affecting my walking. Within a year I was using a stick, two sticks the following year and now it’s a wheelchair. I joke that it’s stopping smoking that caused it, but really it was probably the surgery, and possibly because a speck of blood landed on my spinal cord.

Everyone asks if I feel better for it, or if food tastes different and my honest answer to both is no. I don’t feel worse for it, and sometimes I smell it on a person or walk through the fog as I leave a bar and I feel physically sick. But sometimes I catch a whiff and breathe it in deep and it feels beautiful. And sometimes from nowhere I get a craving for one. I wish I was one of those who could smoke one and then go months without or those who can smoke 60 over a weekend and not smoke again for years. But I’m not one of those.

Cigarettes aren’t the problem when quitting, that’s the easy bit: you just don’t have another one. It’s addiction that you have to fight. I’m a smoker who hasn’t had one for 4 years and isn’t intending to have another. If MS gets me to a point where I struggle to swallow, and I have to pick a “last meal” – I’ll ask for a cigarette for dessert.

I’ve not stopped drinking red wine.

I know from working with clients that opioid and nicotine addictions are similar, and very hard to defeat. It’s the chemical bonding that takes place in the brain that makes it so insistent. Our mind gets involved giving us reasons about ourselves that we find so difficult to deal with: we are weak, we are not up to the task, it might be like this forever, its so damned hard, I’m terrible because (fill-in-the-blank). Overcoming the addiction is compounded by adding this overcoming the mind-chatter.

Just like the stubbed toe can be worsened by the resultant mind-chatter, separate the two and deal with only one adversary at a time. Let the toe throb, it will feel better eventually, nothing you can do. Disconnect the mind-chatter to not keep bringing the toe back into focus. The average cigarette smoker who wants to quit fails an average of 11 times before being a successful non-smoker.

Don’t quit quitting! You will make it.

Meanwhile, I want to read about your experiences enjoying the rest of your life. It sounds like there are some interesting tales there.

Thank you

I could convince myself that I wasn’t actually “addicted” since I too could go hours/days/weeks without one But the reality is that even in those times of “not being an addict” I was still thinking about the stupid things…all the time. Like you, I noticed that my walking and numbness worsened after each cigarette and yet I just kept it up.
Until now, well until yesterday. It’s been a day and a half and as I sit in Starbucks writing this I can glance out the window and see the gas station right across the street….
BUT for NOW for this moment sitting in a new atmosphere (had to get out of the house) I am ok and not tempted to swing by…but check with me in 30 seconds and I might be feeling completely different about the situation. I have to say that I feel the most important thing in all of this is stay focused and REMEMBER my resolve. They have been such a big part of my life that I know if I let my guard down, allow my self to slip into old routines – that is when I will slip up. SO I am thinking of leaving post-it notes for myself – like on every surface of the house and car:)

Good luck my friend!

Cheers!
Meg

Love you too dad!:)