[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by M G F on March 29, 2009, 4:04 pm
Greetings,
I’m afraid that a combination of work and family commitments over the last few months has prohibited Marcus and me from giving this forum the attention is deserves. With any luck that has changed. A friend recently took a journey I though some here would find interesting. I’d certainly like to hear folk’s thoughts about it. I’ll try to be succinct. The quotes are paraphrases, but fairly accurate.
Marcus and I met Carrie when the three of us were in graduate school and over the years we have become close friends and gotten to know each other very well. Not surprisingly some of our conversations have concerned smoking and our relationship to it. Carrie started smoking in her early teens. At first it was only one or two cigarettes every now and then, but that gradually changed, and by the time she entered her sophomore year of high school at age 16, she was smoking 1/4 – 1/2 a pack a day. Carrie was also on her junior high and high school track teams, and although she had started smoking, remained competitive until her junior year. Over the summer her daily consumption had increased and she was smoking half a pack every day, and sometimes more. “I didn’t win any of the meets that year. I knew it was because of smoking, but told myself it would be okay if I just trained harder. I tried to quit right before I started my senior year, but by that time I was smoking close to a pack a day and it was only a half-assed attempt.” Carrie didn’t run that year. Her daily consumption increased in college and by the time Marcus and I met her she had been smoking one and a half packs a day for a number of years.
Fast forward to spring 2007. After smoking for roughly 24 years, most of them at a pack and a half a day, Carrie surprised everyone by not only deciding to quit, but actually doing so. The connection between two separate events precipitated her decision. In January she had an extremely severe cold that settled in her lungs and refused to budge. At one point her condition was so bad I considered insisting on taking her to the hospital. Gradually, though, she recovered; and after a few weeks the residual crud was gone and Carrie was back to her usual healthy, happy self. In April, she and the man she was dating at the time took a vacation to a much higher altitude part of the world, and Carrie’s heart and lungs not only had to cope with the effects of her 30+/- pack years smoking, they had to do so in an atmosphere that has less oxygen to be absorbed. “Walking up one or two flights of stairs, there, was the like running up five or six flights of stairs.” At first I thought it was just the altitude, but it really hit me when we went on a hike and rick was barely breathing hard while I was gasping for air.” It bothered Carrie that even though she was so easily winded and struggled to catch her breath; she still had a strong desire to smoke. “I didn’t like the fact that I was in the shape I was in because of something to which I was so addicted I couldn’t even give up when I was so sick I could hardly breathe. I didn’t like the fact that I’d done it to myself.”
She set her quit date as May 1, and after a couple of brief setbacks, succeeded. Carrie didn’t just quit smoking. She also took up running again. Apart from smoking, she was in good physical condition having always been physically active, and her muscles were soon in good condition. “I expected a lot more soreness than I have. What I didn’t expect was that my stamina would be so shot.”
I was fascinated. One of the human body’s most beautiful and interesting qualities is its ability to heal, particularly from the damage we inflict. The effect of running was evident in her racquetball game and she regularly “cleans the court” with me when we play. The length of time she could run gradually increased as did the distance she could cover. The following spring, Carrie began entering road races and training even harder. Last November, she entered and completed a Marathon, something that would have been totally unthinkable a couple of years ago. The parts of her lungs that are not permanently damaged have improved, and while their functionality will never be what would be if she had never smoked, or had quit earlier, it is much closer to what it should be. At least that would be the case had she not started smoking again.
Carrie and I met for lunch a couple of weeks ago. I assumed that she had picked a restaurant with a heated patio out of consideration for me since I have not quit smoking, and was very surprised when I arrived and found her smoking. I asked what the hell, and she explained that she had been craving a cigarette almost constantly for the past two weeks. Nothing, she said, had triggered it: no super stressful event, no crises. She hadn’t been around more smokers than usual or anything like that. She just wanted a cigarette REALLY BAD. “I finally decided to buy a pack and get it over with. I’ll finish these and that’ll be it.” I noticed that she didn’t seem to be smoking any more or less than she had before she quit smoking, and assumed that when I saw her the next evening, she wouldn’t be smoking. I was wrong. After finishing the pack, Carrie had told herself not to buy another, but had automatically walked into the next drug store she saw and bought another pack. “This’ll have to be it, though. I don’t want to have to go through the whole pain of quitting again.”
Marcus and I had Carrie over for dinner a few nights ago and I saw that she was still smoking and asked her about it. She had refrained from buying another pack of cigarettes after finishing her second for a couple of days, but “It just didn’t feel right. It wasn’t that I had physical cravings; it was just that I wanted to smoke. All of a sudden I realized how much I missed it, and how little I really enjoy running. I may quit again someday, but right now it feels too good.”
I had lunch with, again yesterday and we talked some more. I was concerned that she would soon regret her decision to start smoking again, and wanted to make sure she had really thought about it. Oh, she has. “I don’t know how else to put it, but I LIKE the fact that I’m slowly killing myself. I didn’t realize it before I quit, but that was part of what I liked about it all along.”
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