"I think the hardest thing I ever did was quit smoking," hundreds of people have told me, some with bitterness because they couldn't, and many more with pride at the accomplishment.

I know quitting was hard for me, for sure.

Your Life
and Health

(c) copyright 1999 by Browzer Books.

It took a long time for me to get hooked.  But I was determined.  And I done it good.

The first time I knew being hooked on tobacco wasn't good was when we were broke, I was out of a job, and the rent was past due.  My wife sent me to the store with our very last dollar to buy the baby a gallon of milk; I came back with half a gallon of milk and a whole pack of cigarettes.

Her mouth twisted as she looked at me. 

It made me angry. 

Didn't she understand how it was? 

My mouth twisted as I looked at the worthless cigarettes in my hand.

In a fit of rage I took that pack and crumbled it into little bitty pieces over the trash can, vowing to never, ever let tobacco rule my life again.

Less than two hours later I was clawing through the trash can to find fixings for my pipe.

As the years went by I tried everything to quit: slow withdrawal, total withdrawal, substitution and kicking myself. 

Nothing worked, not even kicking myself.  I just got hooked worse and worse as I faced the fact I could not quit.  The humiliation, the shame of it, brought me low because many a time I'd find myself hunting for butts outside of bars, or down off the curb where rich people fling them on their way in to buy groceries.

Finally I got real serious about quitting.  I was reluctantly smoking up 2 packs a day by then so I took 4 packs with me and headed out into the desert. 

My plan was simple.  I would go as far out as fast as I could until my cigarettes were gone.  Then I'd keep going until I couldn't stand it no more.  (You could do that in Arizona back then and never meet another human being.)   By the time I could get back the craving would be over.  It was a good plan.

I went out, breathing the clean air and savoring the smell of greasewood and the blooming mesquite.  The clean air gave me strength, confidence.   One morning I came to a big tall cliff, almost straight down, and miles around to find a way down.  It was the perfect place to quit smoking.

Taking the last part of a pack from my breast pocket I glanced contemptously at them, and hurled the pack away from me as far as I could fling it.   It sailed out, out, and down, down, to bounce and bounce again to where I couldn't even see them

"Good bye bad habit,"
I yelled,
laughing victoriously. 
"And good riddance."

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As I tore one white cylinder out I breathed a prayer of deep gratitude.  "Thank God I didn't throw the matches away with them!"

More years went by and I learned to console myself that at least tobacco wasn't hurting me.  All those scare stories about cancer didn't scare me:  no sir, not even when I saw Sam Philpot with half his bottom lip removed.   Why, he was still smoking, wasn't he?  Couldn't have been the cigarettes that done it or he'd have quit.  Right?

Then I began coughing up green stuff every morning I woke up.  It wasn't the cigarettes that done it of course.  And I reached for the first one of the day and dragged deep to stifle the coughing.  Only, every morning it took longer and longer to cough all that green stuff up.  It just kept coming up from somewhere.

The worst of it was, if I heard a good joke, laughing at it nearly killed me.  My lungs would collapse and if the joke was so good I couldn't quit trying to laugh, I fell to the floor until the strangulation got the best of the humor in the situation.

That done it.  Killing a poor man slowly with green phlegm ain't so bad, but when you deprive his life of good jokes he might as well be dead anyway.

I was working nights alone then.  For hour after hour I would consider ways of quitting, and knew I'd tried all of them already.   Then one night I was staring at a cigarette and suddenly realized it had all been a mistake.

I looked at that cigarette and realized that it was alien.  It never had been a part of me.  Slowly I put the thing back in the pack, and forgot it.

I forgot about the pack too until a week or so later my wife was changing my clothes over for me and said:  "This is the same pack that was in there yesterday."

I glanced at it, seeing it for the first time in weeks.  "Oh yeah," I said.  "I forgot to tell you; I quit."

It took years for the green phlegm to go away.   It took more years before I could hear an unexpectedly good joke without risking life and limb.  When I see kids lighting up or chawing down I want to yank whatever it is out of their mouths and scream at them,

"Don't be a damn fool.  This is one bad habit you can't quit!"

**There's good news for people like me who can quit.   Insurance companies realize that people with gumption enough to kick the tobacco habit in the teeth for 2 years or more are risks worth taking.  Some doctors think the human body can completely restore itself after someone quits tobacco; but I'll bet you anything they haven't heard a really good joke lately.