Former Smokers

I woke up one morning in 1961, my lung had collapsed. The pain was INTENSE. They hauled me to the hospital where they made a small incision in my chest and inserted a drain tube. They also gave me Demerol injections, lots of them. To this day I don't know what caused it.
I did recover, but never again did I think of smoking.
 

I quit smoking cigarettes by vaping but I am still addicted to nicotine. Probably better than cigs but it can't be good for you. I will say this. I was a heavy smoker when I went into the hospital to have a four way bypass. I planned on smoking up until the day of the surgery. Of course there is no smoking in the hospital. I never cared much for rules. So IV and all I would slip down to the parking lot and smoke a quick one. Then I found out that when I left the cardiac unit an alarm would sound and they would be looking all over for me. I guess to them my heart had stopped.

Being the hard head that I am I found a restroom off the beaten path that had a very strong exhaust fan right over the toilet. So I would stand on the toilet lid, light up and blow the smoke into the vent. I was on some painkillers, sedatives and muscle relaxer because I had a badly injured shoulder. I am thinking, I sure showed these hospital guys. I was forty five years old and still had a head like a rock. After about the third time I climbed up on the toilet to fire one up I guess a couple of brain cells bumped into each other and I thought to myself what in the #@$* am I doing up here smoking a cigarette. I have heart surgery in the morning. I guess I was as crazy as I thought I was. Anyway that pack of cigs had about ten cigarettes left in it so I flushed the butt an crushed the pack and threw them in the trash.

The surgery went well and I quit smoking for about 5 years. Then some very stressful things popped up in my life and I succumbed once again to nicotine addiction. A friend told me how he had quit smoking using Ecigs so I tried it and I have not smoked a cigarette in quite a few years but I am still addicted to nicotine. What I have found is, like most bad habits the first thing I have to do is want to quit before I can move forward. I wanted to quit smoking cigarettes. I smoked three packs a day and they had started to taste really terrible plus the added cough.

Yes I am still addicted to nicotine but I am comfortable knowing that vaping is less harmful than analogue cigarettes but I know it is still not healthy. If you are contemplating using vaping to quit smoking take what you want from these words. I am just sharing my experience. I have read where quitting smoking is considered harder than kicking heroin. Your mileage may very.
 
Pepper said:
I gradually cut down in this new century, first with patches, then with Chantix. I was never able to quit, still savoring 3-5 cigs a day that sent me in a swoon, I loved them so much. Wanted to smoke more, but didn't. Then, 2 years ago, was diagnosed with L cancer. A third of my lung removed. I didn't know I could live through such pain, it was agony. And I thought Natural childbirth was bad. Not in comparison! Took six months to heal surgical wounds. Then, along comes Covid.

Haven't smoked in over two years. Can't smoke. Wish I could. Stupid of me. Won't give in. That would be even more stupid.
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So sorry to hear your story Pepper, I also had a love affair with cigarettes, I just loved it so much, but I finally kicked it, glad you did too.
 
oldpop said:
Being the hard head that I am I found a restroom off the beaten path that had a very strong exhaust fan right over the toilet. So I would stand on the toilet lid, light up and blow the smoke into the vent.
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This reminded me of an old friend, he was much older than me,
but we moved in the same circles, he was the same age as my father.

He had many health issues and very thick reading glasses that you
don't see any more, anyway, he was in Edinburgh Infirmary, the old
one, he too was a heavy smoker and used a bathroom, the large
window in the bathroom had a wide sill about one foot or so off
the floor, so he stood on that and opened the window to blow the
smoke out, That was his last few minutes of life as he fell off the
window sill on to the bathroom floor, which killed him, very sad
as he had a really good sense of humour.

You could say that smoking killed him.

It was good to remember Johnny, but sad to remember how he went!



Mike.
 
I smoked 3 packs of Camels for years. I developed Cardiomyopathy and had to stop immediately. Well, I went cold turkey and was a mess for about a week. I never touched another cigarette nor can I tolerate the smell of its smoke today. This was 26 yrs. ago. But, I do suffer from COPD and slight emphysema. These conditions continue to worsen even though we give up the cigs. It just takes longer.
 
I smoked for about 30+ years. Strangely, I quit for long periods without withdrawals, etc., but always started back up. Haven't smoked in 20 years. Yet, the other day, I was on a trip, and when I came out of the motel, there was a guy having a smoke. I just wanted to have one with him. If I found out that I was going to die in a few weeks, I'd start smoking, again. But, most of the time, I don't have cravings.
 
Mr. Ed said:
When I returned home all traces of tobacco related products including lighters were removed, I stopped cold turkey with little or no withdrawal symptoms.
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That would have made me so mad I would have bought a few cartons and gone back to the hospital to pass them out. If someone came in with a broken arm from a motorcycle accident would they have gone out to the parking lot and set his Harley on fire? If they had a diabetic patient would they have gone to her house and thrown out all the sweets and potatoes.

I've never liked the judgmental stance so many people have about smoking. It is not evil and, as far as I know, it is not a sin. At least I don't think there's a commandment against it. It's a bad health habit, no better or worse or more sinful than a dozen other things, like never working out, or not wearing a bike helmet. But we don't have strangers lecturing us about those things. I used to get a lot of that.

I smoked for 25 years and have now been smoke-sober for 25 years. I quit "cold turkey" but while using the patches. I found the whole process extremely hard. For about a year I was depressed, cried all the time, and gained a lot of weight -- but other bad things were going on in my life at the time, so some of that might have happened anyway.

All that suffering and weight gain for the sake of my lungs and now Covid has done its damage. I wonder which people were most likely to die from Covid, the overweight people or the smokers?
 
Della said:
I wonder which people were most likely to die from Covid, the overweight people or the smokers?
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I find people don't like hearing this, But.....................when the ones who died from covid are shown on TV, they are almost ALL very overweight, even with children.

However, it appears at a glance that most Americans are overweight.
 
I quit mid 20's cold turkey. I had smoked 5-6 years. I had tried several times prior to quit and always cracked but one time I just did it. So glad, looking at smoking co-workers.
 
I went on a Google search to answer my own question and it appears that if you smoke and get Covid you are 14 times more likely to need intensive care than non smokers, and if you are overweight and get Covid you are 37 times more likely to need intensive care. So, as far as Covid goes, it would have been better if I had kept my 110 lb figure and kept on smoking.

The doctors are all recommending we quit smoking and lose weight, disregarding the fact that when the number of smokers went down the obesity rate soared.

Doctors, so eager to tell us what to do, at a loss for words when you ask them how to do it.
 
Well, when I quit smoking, I read a few books about it. One of them was a for dummies book, and the author recommended a technique I used. His major point was to use the patch and nicotine gum simultaneously. It did me no harm, btw. I did not use the gum all day - just when I was ready to have meltdown due to quitting smoking.

The thing is, I think that being addicted to nicotine is no different than being addicted to any other substance. I had a really difficult time quitting. It was so hard for me that I thought "they" should have drug rehab centers only for smokers. Not everyone needs or wants that, of course. But I did.

When I quit for the last time, I discovered that I handled all stress (even a little bit of it) by smoking. Apparently I was very stressed-out as a way of life.
 
I smoked for several years but while in the Navy I quit cold turkey with good reason.
Our 1st. son was born & the price of a carton of Winstons went from 80 cents a carton to $1.20. The price of baby food was 8 cents a jar so for that $1.20 I could buy 15 bottles of baby food. No brainer feed our son.
 
smoked a lot (like eventually well over a pack a day) from college until about 5-6 years ago. woke up one morning with absolutely NO vision in left eye. lack of vision was not what work me up... just typical alarm clock... no pain... nothing. drove myself to ER. walked literally across the street to ophthalmologist who sent me right back to ER. in hospital for 2-3 days. lots of tests. high bp and cholesterol confirmed. had a retinal occlusion. by the time i left hospital, vision had changed from solid black to solid gray.

primary care doc said bottom line... combo of bp, cholesterol and SMOKING were without a doubt main factor. bp/cholesterol could be controlled by diet/meds... smoking HAD ro stop.... that was it. if there was a truly safe cigarette (or alternative), i would probably try it... except i'm too cheap now. if someone walks by smoking... that's an "aroma" i like. if someone who is a smoker enters a room... that's a "stench".
 
I am kind of the opposite, a new "smoker".

I never smoked cigarettes, tried a few but am still working on my first pack. I did however on very rare occasions have a cigar. Then about the time I turned 50 I read that moderate (fewer than 2 or 3 a day) cigar smoking wasn't too risky. At about the same time I read that if you start smoking cigars at a young age they were more hazardous.

So I decided, being past that starting young risk, to smoke a few more. Now I am up to an average of maybe 2 to 5 cigars a month, probably as high as I will go. About the same as my whiskey drinking, and sometimes I do them together.

My grandfather chain smoked cigars all his adult life until shortly before his death at 99, I could do worse...
 
Alcohol and cigarettes go together quite well. I quit both about a year apart. The alcohol went first. For me the other way around probably would not have worked....;)
 

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