I have reached a point where I am confidant that I will never smoke again. Every once in a while, I have a small desire for a smoke, but I haven't had a real craving in a couple of months.
For anyone wanting/thinking about quitting, go to www.whyquit.com. For the first two weeks of my quit, I didn't visit freerepublic once and was reading www.whyquit.com for several hours a day, to constantly remind myself why I should go through the pain of quitting.
All I can say is that quitting was absolutely worth it. The first couple of weeks suck and are completely miserable - there is no denying that - but it is worth it 100 percent.
I gained a few pounds (5-10) and now having "fixed" the smoking problem, I am working on my fitness/nutrition. One step at a time!
Congratulations and keep it up. You should be very proud of yourself.
My mother died from emphysema, caused by years and years of smoking. She was 61. She was so addicted that even when she was on oxygen, in the hospital, recovering from respiratory failure, the nurses caught her in the restroom, smoking a cigarette she had bummed from someone.
A few times, I caught her rooting around in the ashtray of the car in the early morning hours, looking for an old cigarette butt to smoke.
In her remaining months, she spent alot of time in the hospital. She had no bladder control due to the excessive coughing. Finally, they had to do a trach on her, and we never heard her beautiful voice and hearty laugh again..the only time she could talk was when she took the tube out of her trach and plugged. The only way she could communicate was by writing to us.
We brought her home from the hospital, and my dad and I took care of her, cleaning her tubes, washing her hair, changing her depends...She had caught a staph infection, and we had to take her back to the hospital. I hadn't realized how serious that was that day, so went off to work. When I came home from work, and went to the hospital, she was lapsing into a coma. She didn't want to die, but by then it was too late.
We all gathered around her bed on Veteran's Day, 1986, and watched as she left us. Her montiors went flat, and my dad, still in disbelief, asked me if I had kicked the plug out of the wall.
She was gone.