Someone I Love Quit Smoking
An Essay by Stephen Geez
www.StephenGeez.com
Art by Dizzy
Someone I love quit smoking.
What a great cause for celebration! Whenever anybody you care about quits, you should consider that a momentous occasion, too.
Too bad our culture doesn’t offer an elaborate ritual to acknowledge such a life-affirming transition, just as it does for births, marriages, retirements, and so on. Sure, some quitters eventually stop quitting, but I’m fairly certain more than a few marriages eventually fail, too. No amount of pomp and ceremony guarantees any commitment will never come undone, but smoke-stoppers deserve our encouragement, and maybe sincere demonstrations of heartfelt recognition will help them persist that all-important little bit more.
I started losing people to smoke—and witnessing firsthand how wrenchingly they suffered in decline—during my undergrad years, which also happened to be when I got my first book contract: an overview of addiction prevention and treatment methodology. I researched and analyzed virtually every program and study from around the world to identify the best. Back then, the nascent tobacco-cessation movement had barely started; it would be many years before the advent of packaged systems and aids like nicotine patches and gums.
Still, much of what I learned holds true today: quitting cold turkey tends to prove more successful than gradual weaning; all it takes is one completely smoke-free month to quell nicotine-withdrawal symptoms; and if weaning is to work, acute awareness of the triggers helps focus resolve on moments of vulnerability. Simply waiting thirty minutes after cues such as eating, coffee-breaking, or waking up helps sever those links that urge smokers to smoke. Determination, though, and a keen understanding of the stakes in failure, these matter most. After all, nearly all smokers eventually want very much to quit, but many need help.
I never advocate curtailing anyone’s civil liberties, nor do I subscribe to the notion of controlling others’ behaviors through onerous regulation or excessive taxation. I do agree with reasonable limits in the public square, fair opportunity for smokers to smoke along with freedom for the rest of us not to breathe it.
I’m a fan of Dr. Joseph R. DiFranza of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. A researcher devoting much of his career to understanding tobacco addiction, he has shown how one in ten adolescents experience symptoms within two days of their first smoke. That rate rises to one in three within a month.1 A large New Zealand study finds one in four symptomatic within their first four cigarettes. Dr. DiFranza cites cases where the first cigarette affected one’s brain enough to trigger the onset of addiction. His model explains how the cravings signal more than a desire to avoid withdrawal; rather, the brain has altered its biochemical makeup to accommodate the ongoing presence of nicotine. Quitters aren’t just learning to go without; they’re struggling to change back into what they used to be.
Into what they were meant to be.
Okay, so that makes me a big fan of the whole Don’t Start school of thought, but many we love have already been smoking for a long time. It begins in response to social conditioning, maybe owing a bit to advertising, certainly owing a lot to peer pressure. I’m most sympathetic to those who started before we really knew the danger, before those who did know were forced to admit how harmful smoking really is. That’s when my loved one got addicted, but for anyone starting today there simply is no excuse.
What everybody ought to know by now is simple: tobacco smoke is the method of drug ingestion that often proves fatal when used as directed. It diminishes one’s ability to survive, and to live productively and pain-free. Yeah, sure, a rare few manage to reach “old age” despite smoking, but I’ll bet they could have lived even longer. Smoking severely damages a body, and the sooner one quits, the better the odds at least some of that damage can be reversed.
I’m proud of the many I’ve known who simply chose to live longer, healthier lives, then steeled their determination. Others quit because they had to—each new smoke started causing severe respiratory distress; hospital rules forbade lighting up in the cancer ward; open flame carried the risk of igniting an oxygen tank . . . If you haven’t quit while you could still breathe, odds are you will when you’re gasping for every breath.
And yet, my good friend’s mother, three years into fighting lung and related cancers—surgeries, chemo, radiation—still sneaks smokes, thinking nobody knows.
Choosing to start smoking, choosing to quit—these are not decisions you make only for yourself. Does anybody love you? Seriously, we all have acquaintances, many we call friends, but who is on that list of people who truly love you?
What in life would be harder for them to face than watching you die?—especially knowing it didn’t have to happen, that you chose for them years of your own fading relevance, that you opted out of sticking around long enough to see how it all turns out?
I’ve had smokers tell me everybody’s gotta die of something. Oh yeah? But when? And how? And with how much quality of life at the end?
It hurts more than you can imagine to think of the people I’ve loved already dead by smoke. Plus, I have to deal with knowing that to this day my best friend continues to smoke, as do the majority of my closest friends. I’ve tried, and I intend to keep trying, but I can’t make them stop.
After all that research, I still don’t know how.
So now I’m going to write it out:
If you’re not already a smoker, please don’t start. I keep hearing that it’s really hard to quit.
If you do smoke, please stop. Care enough about yourself, and think about who in this vast world loves you, then decide how much you’re willing to hurt them.
If someone you love smokes, please don’t pretend it’s okay. At least try pointing out that you’re worth quitting for. It might just work. If not, maybe it’ll be easier to live with the loss knowing you tried.
And finally, if you can’t find the right words, you’re welcome to use mine.
The one I love smoked for a long time. She did try to quit on a number of occasions, and one day she finally succeeded. She learned how to live smoke-free, something she could have done long ago, even when she thought she couldn’t.
As proud and grateful as I am for what she did, though, the sad fact is that when too much damage is done, quitting can only buy you a bit more time.
I wanted more, way more than the little bit she got.
And I know it never should have ended that way.
Yes, someone I love quit smoking . . .
Too late.
* * *
1DeFranco, Dr. Joseph R., “Hooked from the First Cigarette”, Scientific American, May 2008
© The Fresh Ink Group, LLC, 2008
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