Quit smoking aid
It’s an old story and a cliche, but like many cliches it’s based in truth: Quitting smoking is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
I began smoking as a teenager, dabbling with cigarettes, cloves and “bedes” – Indian cigarettes – near the end of my high school years. As a freshman in college I didn’t smoke at all, but then at some point between my freshman and sophomore years, I became a smoker. And I needed a quit smoking aid many, many times over before I could officially become a former smoker.
My personal quit smoking aid of choice was the best one: Fear. Fear of cancer, heart disease, and imminent death. My family – both sides of my family – have medical histories littered with the above. My maternal grandfather, for example, smoked for sixty-five years. A large, jovial and vivacious man, he lived into his early 80s. But the last six months of his life were spent withering away in the hospital as lung cancer slowly and surely killed him. There is no better quit smoking aid than that for anyone.
Years later my father would expire. He didn’t live long enough to get cancer; it was a heart attack that killed him. His father had also died of a heart attack. Both of them were smokers throughout much of their lives. My dad began smoking as a fifteen year old in the late ’50s. He smoked cigarettes for twenty years, eventually switching to cigars in the late 1970s. He quit smoking all-together in 1991 after a bout with pneumonia, but by then the damage had already been done. By the time he was in his 60s, his heart was functioning at only 40% of capacity and his veins were littered with cholesterol and fatty deposits that are caused by smoking.
Of course he got off lucky. Yes, he died young (he was just sixty-five), but his worst nightmare was a lingering death of the type his father-in-law and his sister suffered. And it was all due to smoking.
So if you’re looking for a quit smoking aid, you probably don’t have to look any further than your own family history. Most of us have one relative or another who’ve died from smoking related illnesses, and that should be all the impetus you need. If it’s not, then you need to take a real look in the mirror and think about the loved ones you’ll leave behind when you do go, and consider that as another reason to stop.
