Tag Archives: quitting

For the first time in my adult life I didn’t want to smoke!

Admissions, Gadgets, Health, , ,

In which there’s good news.

We flew to DC last Thursday so I could see Amma.

We had a very short layover in Milwaukee, then got to Reagan, walked to the hotel shuttle stand, and waited for the bus. Got to the hotel, went out to eat on a cute little street a few blocks away, and walked back to our hotel around midnight. Only when back in our room after having been in Arlington for hours did I bother to unpack, assemble, fill, and use my ecig device, and then only briefly before going to bed.

The next day, I realized that in all that travel I never once wanted to smoke. I thought about smoking in a vague sort of way when we were waiting at the bus stand; I thought, “A few months ago, I’d be considering smoking now, even though it’s probably not allowed. I’d probably cross the street and stand over there and suck down a cig and hope the shuttle didn’t come until I was done.”

Every previous layover on every previous flight I’ve ever taken, I’ve furiously crunched times in my head and if there was enough, I rushed to smoke. Is there a smoking lounge in this airport? How far is it from my gate? Can I get there and back in time? Will I miss my flight? If not, do I have enough time to get all the way outside, smoke, and get back in through security and still make my connection?

And on arrival, the same thing: where am I meeting my ride? Where’s the smoking area? Do I have enough time to smoke? HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS PLACE SO I CAN SMOKE?

It was really nice, not giving a shit about smoking! I didn’t even remember that I was a(n ex) smoker during the Milwaukee layover; past me would have been infuriated that it was so short and that I’d been denied the opportunity to try to get a cig in, but current me didn’t even think about it.

Same on the trip home: instead of standing outside, sucking down a few cigs while waiting for the cab back to the airport, I just sat inside the hotel lobby by the doors to the taxi stand, waiting like a normal person. Didn’t think about smoking at all during the two-hour layover, didn’t think about it when we arrived back in MSP, didn’t have to smoke in the parking garage before getting in the truck to drive back to the apartment, didn’t have to smoke when we got home. (Did have a lovely chain-vape later, before finally keeling over from the exhaustion of having been up all night, though.)

Vape

Having never travelled without having to figure out how and where and when to smoke before in my adult life, the experience was really wonderful. No cravings, no anxiety about how and where to get my fix in. No simmering rage at the constant non-smoking announcements and signage one is endlessly subjected to in airports and on airplanes.

Vaping continues to be a fantastic solution for me. I have to admit to being quite surprised at how quickly it has broken all the habits and thought patterns associated with being a smoker. When I leave the house now, I just leave and don’t automatically check my bag for a pack of cigs and a lighter. (I rarely take my mod with me when I go out, unless I’m going to the ecig store for liquid or coils, and only then because it’s fun to vape inside the store itself since it’s allowed.) I have 31 years of smoking habits to overcome, but they just seem to be going away on their own without stress or even effort. I didn’t even think about smoking while we were traveling! I was not annoyed, I did not have a nic fit! Not even a little!

I have yet to go an entire day without vaping at all, since quitting smoking 62 days ago, but while on some days I do start vaping earlier than I ever smoked (I’ve never been a morning smoker; I always did all my smoking from late afternoon on), or I indulge in a few hours of “chain vaping,” on other days I just use it for a few minutes a few times in the evenings. It continues to be much cheaper than smoking, because even though a 30ml bottle of liquid is twenty bucks, it lasts many more days than the same value of cigarettes ever did. My lung health is much, much better. I don’t clear my throat all the time, I don’t have weird snot, and my voice doesn’t sound like that of a smoker, either, which is a cool benefit.

While I suspect that Scott doesn’t like the smell (he’s too nice to say, really), it’s very mild and leaves virtually no permanent odor. I’ve tested this by vaping for a bit, then going out to the corner store and returning with a fresh nose. One gets the impression that there was maybe some weak-ass incense burnt a few days ago, but that’s about it (and as we do burn incense fairly regularly, sometimes I can’t tell if it’s that or the vapor residue). For awhile I had a little bowlful of used coils sitting around, but that did smell bad, so I got rid of them; and I now keep the bottles of liquids in a plastic bag because the combination of their various scents is gross, but in general I see no reason not to vape indoors.

My clothes, hair, skin, pockets, and purse don’t smell like cigarettes, butts, or smoke anymore. It’s great! Added benefit: I’m no longer terrified of catching a cold and ending up in an oxygen tent with a lung infection.

Like I’ve said before, it’s probably not a zero-harm activity, but compared to smoking cigarettes the benefits of vaping are enormous.

Total convert here, guys.

Admissions, Gadgets, Health, PSA, Soapbox, ,

In which I’ve quit smoking!

I started smoking at 16. I’m 47 now. That’s 31 years.

I was down to smoking less than a pack a day, usually less than half a pack, but my lungs felt dry and tight. I was having difficulty breathing.

Every morning, I decided not to smoke. Every evening I smoked anyway, because the power of habit is massive. I’ve tried keeping my regular behaviors and just ditching the smoking part, but it’s hard. I’ve gotten up, put on my coat, grabbed my ebook, stepped outside and not smoked, just to keep up my normal routine, but it doesn’t really work. Before you know it, you’ve bought yourself a pack of cigarettes.

You need a substitute. And no, not for the nicotine. The gum and the patches are worthless; I’ve tried both. For the smoking.

Luckily, here in the future, we have such a thing! It’s called vaping.

A well-controlled trial has recently been carried out by Dr Grant O’Connell and colleagues working for the vaping manufacturer Fontem Ventures. They asked 15 smokers to give up altogether for five days, 15 to vape only for five days, and another 15 to mix vaping and smoking for five days. They measured the harmful and potentially harmful constituents in the urine, blood and breath of each group, and the results were striking. After five days, the vapers’ carboxyhaemoglobin levels—an indication of how much carbon monoxide they had in their systems—had dropped by 83%, which was an even bigger drop than in the cold-turkey cessation group, whose levels dropped by 75%. Even the dual users had seen a drop of 23%. The amount of carbon monoxide they exhaled had halved in both the vapers and the cessation group. Much the same was true for all the other biomarkers except, of course, for nicotine.

– Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016

So I bought a Vuse at the corner gas station. It was a piece of shit and just as sketchy as the first ecig I bought a decade ago and it was so awful it basically drove me back to cigarettes. (The Vuse is by RJ Reynolds. There is speculation that they were specifically designed to drive smokers back to cigarettes. They taste bad and they’re incredibly inconsistent, delivering either burnt-tasting air or a massive hit of lung-scorching, scaldingly hot vapor. Each replacement cartridge costs at least as much as a pack of cigarettes, if not more.) The Vuse would be an acceptable experience only if you were a hard-core smoker locked in an airport or hospital for days with no other way to deal with your discomfort.

Then I bought this sciencey-looking little Pro Tank II for only $20 at the ecig store over on Lake Street, and I haven’t had a cigarette since.

Kanger 650mAh Pro Tank II

It screws together. The whole bottom section is a rechargable battery, with a button you push to send power to the coil; the tank is Pyrex and holds e-juice, which is vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol with flavorings and nicotine, and contains a coil, which is what actually heats up and turns the juice into vapor; and then the tip is the part you inhale through. There’s an utterly bewildering variety of these things, but all of them are basically made up of these three components.

An old Fairfield friend saw my interest in ecigs on Facebook, and kindly sent me his unwanted stuff (he’s discovered a favorite brand of tank, and no longer uses any of this):

Vaping stuff

That’s hundreds of dollars of equipment and ten flavors of juices! That he was just going to throw out! A Vaporfi kit, a Nautilus tank, an Aerotank Mega, a Halo Tracer kit, a second Vaporfi tank, and coils!

Now I have tons of everything. Batteries and chargers, tanks, tips. Most of the parts are interchangeable, too, so you can mix and match and make devices that look cool and draw, due to adjustable air flow rings on the nicer tanks, exactly the way you want them to. These are the two I’m into right now:

Vapor

I’m into the 6% blueberry and 3% cocoa flavors right now. (I hate even typing that because it sounds so douchey, but it is what it is! Blueberry! Cocoa! I’m a twat!)

I started with 18% juice, but I don’t think I need it. They tell you that nicotine is incredibly addictive, but I’m perfectly comfortable with 6% and 3% juices. I do have a tank loaded with the 18%, but haven’t used it much in the past two days.

I haven’t gone five days without a single cigarette in years. I’ve gone one, two days without a cigarette, sure; I’ve gone days only smoking one or two. But zero cigarettes? For five days? In a row? No, not in years.

With low-nicotine juice and a device that works well, one can enjoy the activity of ‘smoking’ almost to excess, and yet wake up in the morning feeling better than she has in years. It’s fucking wonderful.

While I doubt vaping is a zero-harm activity (after all, what is), it’s definitely lower harm than smoking cigarettes. It’s almost therapeutic-feeling; inhaling mist into dry, damaged lungs actually feels good. (Turns out that juice uses the same base used in asthma inhalers and nebulizers.) And apparently my carboxyhemoglobin levels have dropped by 83%.

Eighty-three percent.

The devices themselves probably last for quite a long time, being made of Pyrex and stainless steel. You have to replace the coil, the part that heats up, and the juice, but from what I can tell that’s much less expensive than 3.5 packs of cigarettes every week.

There’s a bunch of negative hysteria around e-cigarettes, but it appears to have been deliberately manufactured by pharmaceutical companies involved in nicotine replacement therapies and cigarette companies. The recent FDA regulation binge was brought on by these lobbies, apparently. Of course. Since so much money is generated by the luxury taxes on cigarettes, anything that threatens the market is worrisome… even if it’s a technology that is reducing harm and by extension probably saving lives.

The bulk of the evidence so far leans heavily toward vaping being much safer than cigarettes, and much more effective than NRT in helping people quit smoking.

– E-cigarette studies, research and reports
– E-cigarettes save lives
– UK doctors urge wide promotion of e-cigs to help smokers quit
– Smokers Urged to Switch to E-Cigarettes by British Medical Group
– Vapers Helping Smokers to Quit

So, the take-away here is that we’re seeing research showing that vaping is much less harmful than smoking, and that if you wish to vape, you need to buy a decent piece of equipment and avoid shitty disposables made by cigarette companies. The vapor, even from low-nicotine juices, is so satisfying that you don’t even want cigarettes. Vaping is credited with helping tens of thousands of smokers quit.

“In the case of addictions, where people find it genuinely very hard to resist temptation, harm reduction surely makes sense,” said Viscount Ridley. And I agree. Being against vaping because it’s not zero-harm is ridiculous. If we expected driving to be zero-harm, we’d never build another car again. But as far as risk management goes, vaping is safer than smoking by orders of magnitude.

Gigs, boys, being boring for health, and books.

Life, , , , ,

In which I’m so boring I did laundry AND cleaned my room AND went to bed early last night.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast weekend was the first annual Walla Walla Guitar Festival. It was a raging success, especially considering this was its first year; we sold out and everything!

I had a fantastic time, and seriously loved having so many players in town at once — I spent at least three hours just hanging out in the green room chatting with the other players.

Here’s an image of my performance with Coyote Kings. We opened the festival:

Coyote Kings w/Mush feat Kenny 'Blue' Ray

(The amazing Kenny ‘Blue’ Ray sat in with us, as did Cookie, but they’re not in this picture.)

I got hit on by — not one, but two — boys in their 20’s. It was, for reasons I can’t articulate and suspect are entirely due to being socialized, immensely gratifying.

(I went home alone, of course.) (What? What am I going to do with a boy in his twenties? Be jaded at him?) (Also, I couldn’t care less about sex, to be honest.)

~+~+~
Yes, I’m still quitting smoking.

I do not want to do this, and I am not at all gung ho and positive about it: I just don’t want to have to pull a goddamned tank of oxygen around with me at the grocery store when I’m 45.

Quitting means that, for awhile, my life consists of two things: Being At Work, and Being At Home. There are no other portions, because Other Portions (read: having any kind of social life whatsoever) cause me to lame out and smoke.

In other words, I really try not to but I still bum cigarettes in many social circumstances. But, since this is Still Better Than Smoking Every Day, I am counting it A Triumph every time I get to put ‘Cigs: 0’ on my Google calendar, even if it’s only Five or Six, and not Seven, Times each week.

I’ve been smoking for a long time. (Hell, I’ve been quitting for a long time.) Baby steps. Self-isolating, new-habit-building baby steps.

~+~+~
Not smoking means not drinking, because drinking makes me smoke. Cutting out both for the last month means I have extra munny.

I added up that unspent money and spent it on clothes. I’m expecting a new skirt, thigh high socks, tights, and a long sleeved t-shirt by Friday.

(Since I now ride a bike everywhere, I’ve decided to experiment with a short skirt-and-tights look for those parts of the year that are not winter. All my current skirts are floor length, and periodically get caught in the chain and threaten my life thereby. Boo!)

I also bought two cheap bikinis, because mine are older than the boys who hit on me last weekend, and seriously need to be replaced. (Of course I’m too old to hang out in bikinis a lot, I realize that, but I do wear them under other things, particularly at summer gigs.)

~+~+~
Yesterday after work I didn’t want to go straight home, so I stopped for a latte. Here’s a picture of my Kindle Fire tablet and my cuppow at Starbucks:

Cuppow

I know, right?

~+~+~
I’m reading a huge amount of non-fiction right now. All of the following are currently in heavy rotation on my tablet:

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar – This is the Dunbar’s Number guy, and his premise is that we evolved language in order to gossip in order to be able to manage larger groups.

The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin – This is indirectly about that idiot who inadvertently brought back a bunch of nearly-eradicated childhood diseases by making false claims against the MMR vaccine, and about vaccination and science in general.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner – People kept telling me to watch the movie so I did and it was okay so I bought the book thinking it’d have, like, moar insight, but it doesn’t appear to. Sorta meh about this, considering JUST HOW EXCITED people were when they told me about it.

Liars & Outliers by Bruce Schneier – This is a book about trust, society, security, and cryptography, and interestingly it’s a lot like Dunbar’s book about how humans build society.

AdWords for Dummies by Howie Jacobson – A bullshit book written by someone who obviously has been hocking crap via spam and infomercial for the past decade.

They’re all awesome (except for the last one, which completely sucks and which I will not finish. I was supposed to read it for work, but honestly, that POS is un-fucking-readable and it has pretty much soured me on the entire For Dummies franchise) and if you want to borrow any of them (in Kindle format), just let me know.

~+~+~
Tonight, I’ll get off work at six and ride my bike home. I’ll stretch, read, meditate, eat tostadas, and knit while watching ancient episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I will go to bed early. I will not smoke. It’ll be awesome*.

—
* Where “awesome” equals OMFG GIVE ME A GODDAMNED CIGARETTE ALREADY.

Quitting Smoking: Day 4

Health, , , ,

In which I write about a topic that is probably only interesting to me.

cigI really dig smoking.

A lot.

But I’ve done a great deal of it, and for the past year or so it’s been becoming less and less fun. I’m a judgmental bitch, so let me inform you here and now that I’ve always had a big problem with smoker’s coughs because I think they’re just utterly tacky and icky.

Which is why it was Not Good when I realized I was developing one myself. It was mild and inconstant, and thank God I hadn’t begun those nasty daily morning hacking sessions, but still. I was clearing my throat all the time.

And the smell is bad. Period. I don’t smoke in my house or in my car (only because I don’t have one), but that didn’t stop me from smelling like an ashtray. I was always aware during hugs that I was probably offending whoever I was hugging.

The cost was getting absurd, too. Sure, I was only smoking half a pack a day, but that’s still over $120 a month. (I could buy entire Etsy outfits for that!)

And it’s not like I haven’t already smoked enough. I’ve smoked upwards of 180 thousand cigarettes in my life! I’m quite certain I have the whole thing grokked by now, and that further research into the subject would only reveal me to be stupid.

Then there were the stains on my fingers, which I simply never considered. I mean, I knew they were there, and I scrubbed them in the shower, but I just didn’t think about them.

Then there were all those cigarettes I didn’t enjoy. I started noticing when I cut down to half a pack that my first one each day was yucky, and that I was only smoking it for the nicotine: the actual physical experience was one of dizziness, nausea, and mild discomfort.

My hygienist never failed to mention my “smoking habit” and its effects on my oral heath when I went to get my teeth cleaned.

I was still enjoying my before-bed cigarettes quite thoroughly, booyah, but the more of those I had, the worse my mornings felt. Nasty mouth, gummy eyes, hard time waking up. Fucking fuck.

I got laryngitis one weekend and went and read the article about it on WebMD. In the home care section it said, “especially avoid smoking,” which was just about par for the course since every other goddamned illness or symptom I’d looked up on the Internet in the past year had said exactly the same thing. Fucking fuck!

Then there was the really gross stuff. The kind of stuff you do but don’t think about because it’s just so foul. I have, during my smoking career, done all of the following more than once:

  • gone through all the ashtrays and garbage cans in the house looking for butts to smoke
  • smoked multiple very dirty, stinky, short butts because I didn’t have any whole cigarettes
  • smoked butts out of strange or public ashtrays
  • chosen to buy a pack of cigarettes instead of a meal
  • stolen cigarettes out of unattended packs
  • gone to get cigarettes when I would not have left the house for any other reason (like when ill, or practically snowed in, or profoundly lazy and comfortable)
  • smoked when I was not only sick, but very sick. Like bronchitis sick.

= = =
The Internet tells me that nicotine is really hard to kick. As in, more addictive than crack, with only 10% of quitters staying quit.

The Internet also tells me that it’s really easy to quit smoking ’cause all you gotta do is, like, quit smoking.

The Internet also also tells me that it only takes three days to get over nicotine (or get it out of your system, I’m not sure which), which means that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.

= = =
I don’t feel any better, but the compulsive throat-clearing has eased. And I’ve already saved fourteen bucks. And I don’t smell like smoke.

I just WANT SOMETHING all the fucking time. Which is really fucking annoying.

Since I’m pretty much always on a diet, I gave myself several days of carte blanche eating while I quit smoking. Instead of caving and buying a pack of smokes on my lunch hour I’ve been buying stupid junk food instead, like cups of Starbucks Signature hot chocolate, or entire bowls of soup from Quizno’s (AFTER I’d already eaten my lunch), or giant cookies. For dinner last night, I ate an entire chile relleno platter from Rosita’s. That’s about 2.5 meals worth of calories, and at least two days worth of sodium.

I’ve been avoiding places I smoked (like the porch on my house), I always have a beverage in my hand, and I can barely even look at an ashtray without being half-disgusted and half-jonsed.

On Monday, the extra calorie shit will stop; I’m just being nice to myself this week. (I would much rather have lung cancer than be obese. I know that makes me shallow, but I’m just sayin’.) I think if someone handed me a cigarette right now, I’d go outside and smoke it even though I know it would be gross and taste bad and make me lightheaded.

Luckily no one is going to hand me a cigarette, so I’m safe for the rest of today.

But tomorrow will be another story, because I’ll be riding with a smoker to and from a gig in Richland. Hopefully remembering all the things I’ve written here will help me resist nicotine’s damned powerful siren call during those two hours.

Quitter.

Decisions, , , , , ,

In which I bought treeware.

For my birthday, I quit smoking.

On my lunch hour, instead of smoking I went into the bookstore and bought myself The Eyre Affair, a book I’ve been meaning to read since it came out eight years ago.

Birthday book!

I mean, what the hell, right? It is my birthday, after all, and at least in this format G’ma can read it when I’m done.

Then, still wanting something – namely nicotine, which I was not having – I went into Starbucks for a hot chocolate. And they gave it to me for free, since it’s my birthday! Cool, huh?

In other super awesome news, dad’s taking me (and my brother) out for a birthday dinner to T. Mac’s after work tonight. How lucky am I?