42 Years Of Smoking

It is amazing I am not dead.

Why and how I managed to quit smoking.

Fifty three years ago I had a friend who was a girl (not an official Girlfriend).

Her mom smoked and worked away from home all day, an opportunity her daughter utilized to pinch her smokes and share them with me. Both our parents smoked as well.

So off and on I became accustomed to smoking; my smoking habit got a real boost when I joined the merchant marine service at the age of seventeen, because sailors are allowed to purchase cigarettes tax-free outsideof territorial waters.

Eventually I began smoking more and even more cigarettes and had to get out of bed two or three times nightly for an additional nicotine fix.

Life without cigarettes was just not imaginable.

Going on an airline was sheer torture because I was not allowed to smoke for two or three of hours.

On a flight from Canada to Singapore I sneaked a few of smokes in the washroom in spite of the fact that airplanes were already putting people in jail for smoking on board.

As the years went by half of my mother's family died of lung cancer.

My father's only sibling died of lung cancer.

My mother died of a brain tumor - she used to be a heavy smoker.

My father developed lung cancer.

After he got lung cancer he visited me; he looked like a pathetic skin on bones human, wearing a corduroy suit, however even at this point he still stood outside SMOKING IN OUR GARAGE.

My brother's wife has breast cancer; my brother smokes cigars, and second-hand smoke is known to cause breast cancer.

I personally began having coughing spells in the nighttime and the vision in my left eye began to deteriorate.

Me quitting smoking? Impossible :

I've no willpower.

Because I knew I couldn't possibly quit I never even bothered to acquire Nicorette or any other smoking-cessation product.

So after a whole lifetime of smoking I knew I was going to die of lung cancer too.

However WAIT: the story isn't finished yet.

On September fourth, 2002 I was browsing in a Calgary bookstore called Black and Noble and a book jumped out at me.

It was a 385 page book called "How to Stop Smoking" by a British accountant named Allan Carr.

I glanced at the 1st couple of pages where the author boasted that his book was the only way to quit smoking without any withdrawal symptoms or even without a nocotine patch.

I bought the book because I was curious to see how anyone could write 385 pages about how to quit smoking.

I finished the book in 9 days.

On September 13, 2002 at 3 pm I took my last drag from a cigarette and exhaled it through a Kleenex.
That was my last cigarette. Since then I have never even thought about smoking again. People can smoke all around me and I'm not even slightly tempted.

This book really changed my mindset. The book "How to Stop Smoking" by Allan Carr is not available in American bookstores, but can be found in Canada and at internet bookstores such as Amazon. I no longer have my smoker's cough and the vision in my left eye is back to normal.