Nov. 17--Thursday brings another Great American Smokeout, an admirable occasion that never did me any good as a cigarette smoker. It didn't help me for a couple reasons: I don't like to join things, and I could never not smoke for more than a couple hours (unless I was sleeping). To have quit for a whole day would have been impossible.
Appropriately, the American Cancer Society uses the day to get smokers to attempt to save themselves from the damage of smoking: various cancers and also emphysema and other physical maladies brought on by inhaling the smoke of tobacco leaves on an hourly basis for years and years.
I should add, however, that I did quit. Unlike a lot of people who can remember the very moment they had their last cigarette, I can't, because if I had thought of it that way, I never would have been able to quit. "This will be my last cigarette!" Couldn't do it.
What did work for me was this: fast-forwarding in my imagination to the cold, harsh morning when my doctor would walk in to tell me that there was a spot on my lung, and it didn't look good -- or that I had emphysema, like my late father and his late siblings had. And I would think: How could smoking have been worth this? I had ceased to enjoy it years before; in later years, it was simple enslavement.
So 20 years or so ago, I took advantage of a 24-hour hospital stay for minor surgery -- when I wouldn't be able to sneak a smoke -- to make it through the first day. That gave me the start I needed. Even at that, it remains the hardest thing I have ever done -- unquestionably.
The thing is, smoking still could kill me even though I have quit, but the cancer society points out that the odds of that are dropping each year.
I still think about all that every year at this time, when I quietly celebrate my freedom. So for all those nonjoiners out there, fine, don't quit Thursday. Do yourself a favor; do it today instead.
rwerland@tribpub.com
