We all know the drill on smoking. Smokers will eventually be brutally murdered by it and words like 'emphysema', 'embolism' and 'cancer' will be present on their hospital charts. They will forever be remembered as the family members "who died because they smoked one pack a day". Friends will ask why they didn't just quit.
But it's not all about a smoker's death – these days it's one of the most 'uncool' things you can do in public. It can be compared to weeing on a restaurant table or picking your nose in front of everyone and then eating it.
Strict laws on public smoking have now been put in place. These laws include not smoking anywhere near a public entrance, as well as not smoking outside restaurants. Yep, that's right – you can smoke inside a restaurant in a poorly-ventilated room, but you can't smoke outside.
It has become socially unacceptable to smoke where there are children close by. Smokers are frowned upon and told how much their breath, hands, clothes and hair stink. They are confronted each day by friends who claim “that the smell of them brings on a strong headache”.
This seems to be turning into a very whiny article, doesn't it?
Calling it quits
What I actually wanted to share, was how in light of all the above mentioned aggravations, I (along with my very supportive husband) decided to quit smoking. For good.
So the end date was set, and we attended a stop-smoking seminar. All went well during the seminar, until we smoked our final cigarette. Things were fine until the moment I killed it. Then, panic struck and I already craved another one.
We were told what to visualize when we crave, and I did that during the relaxation exercise at the end of the seminar, hoping that it would have a hypnotic effect on me and that I would be smoke-free forever.
When my husband and I got home that Sunday afternoon, I took a leisurely nap. When I woke up a while later, I forgot that I had quit smoking and was on my way to get my packet of ciggies when I remembered that I was a quitter. Things only went downhill from there...
On Monday, I got to the office in a state of panic. I had some work to do, but it felt as if someone had told me to scrub a toilet that hadn't been flushed in years. I couldn't stop drinking coffee, and I ate everything that I could find. It was about twelve o'clock that I, to the amusement of my colleagues, crawled under my desk in a futile attempt to hide from the world.
On Tuesday, I woke up with the worst headache I'd had in quite some time. I figured it was part of the nicotine-detox. I stayed at home. While I was lying on the couch, my brother came into the room and asked me what had happened to his Caramello Bears. The night before my husband and I had raided the pantry and found them stashed away at the back. We ate all but two.
My brother was a bit irritated with me because I had taken his sweets without asking, and I in turn nearly had a nervous breakdown. I was really tempted to kick him in the groin for daring to question my craving for chocolate! I screamed at him that he was being cruel to me by denying me the only pleasure that I had left in the world.
On Wednesday, I went back to work and had to use all the willpower in my entire being to not hang around like a junkie, waiting for someone to pass by and throw their 'stompie' on the ground so that I could pick it up and smoke it. I was singing songs about Peter Stuyvesant, imagining the taste of one final cigarette, building a chocolate cake in my mind that had a cigarette-candle on top. The professionals at the seminar had warned us that this would happen, and I quickly went back to telling myself why I had quit in the first place. I had a little mantra that I also read aloud. I convinced myself to go another day without smoking.
On Thursday, however, I was sitting in one of our boardrooms having a sad cup of coffee, when one of my smoking-buddies walked past the door and greeted me. I basically ran after him, and begged him to give me a fix of nicotine. He relented, and I failed on my fourth day of being a non-smoker.
I went back into the office, feeling like I had done hard drugs. I was back in the abyss of smoking. I told my husband, and he admitted that he had smoked as well. We had both failed at the same time.
When we were on our way home, we stopped at the shop to buy a big enough stash to satiate our need.
Typical junkies
My husband and I are typical junkies. We'll fantasize about it when we don't have it. We'll crave it to the point where all logical thoughts (i.e. that we are killing ourselves) are overridden and we'll hide from our non-smoking friends so that we can smoke just one more.
I don't know how we are going to beat this addiction, but we will try again. We will try again and again and again, even if it takes us years to finally break free.
I don't think many people realize that this is actually an addiction like any other. There aren't any rehab centres for smoking. You can attend a workshop, but there won't be regular NA (Nicotinaholics Anonymous) meetings where you declare your progress in front of a large group of supportive ex-smokers.
Even though it's frowned upon, you can still, to some extent, smoke in public places. We as smokers will fight with our non-smoking friends over seating arrangements in a restaurant, and we will become irate if they ask us to 'not smoke' when they are in our cars.
We are only a small step away from stealing money from family members to buy our next rush.
Maybe smoking should be banned (oh, I can hear the smokers rioting already) and we should be treated like any other person who is caught with an illegal substance.
I think that we'll all be better off if we could just be rid of this stinking addiction, even though some may argue that they actually like the taste of a cigarette.
If we hadn't smoked on that fateful Thursday morning, we would have been over the worst withdrawal by now.
I feel a strong guilt trip coming on, so I'll quickly go outside and have one last cigarette to make myself feel better.
Marle Bekker
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