Quitting: She did a bad, bad thing

By Suzanne Danforth

August 30, 2007 6:00 AM

Writing a weekly column seems as if it should be, for lack of a more accurate term, easy. You think you are on a trajectory, a curvilinear path that takes you from here ...; to there. Not so. Especially when the column regards smoking. Or not smoking. Or trying not to smoke.

When I began this endeavor, I figured that "coming out" to the community was a wise thing to do. I pitched the local newspaper after a day or two of writing about my quitting experience. There it was. Not bad, I said to myself. Decent writing. What the hey, I'll pitch it to the daily and see if they will have it. Surely there are others like me out there. Surely.

In life, the loneliest experiences you endure are that: lonely. But there is always a voice, small but persistent, that reminds you that you are human. And since there are 6 billion of us or so on the planet right now, there must be a few who are sharing this experience. Right? And if there are people sharing this experience, perhaps there are some in my demographic.

I have a confession. Goethe says that all writing is confession. My confession is that I have smoked. Not continuously. Not happily. But since I am in this for the honesty of it, to you, dear reader, I confess: I have smoked.

Until tonight, I have smoked 1.0 cigarettes. One whole cigarette, over two instances separated by time, space and doubt. Tonight, I have blown cigarette smoking out of the water.

Why? Because I am human and made up of chemicals and neurotransmitters and the space between synapses that (improbably) dictate my behavior. This, despite being in possession of a pretty impressive cortex; that wrinkled part of our brains that make us human.

The human cortex is wrinkled for a purely Darwinian reason: the convolutions evolved to allow us more brain space than, say, a bird. Or even a dog, those wonderful creatures who share our front lawns and, if they are lucky, our beds. And we need our brain space, to negotiate the challenges that are presented to us, in the form of "life." Used to be the challenges were somewhat more pressing than those modern culture serves up. Like, how to devise a tool, or create fire or get the boys out of the cave to hunt.

Today's challenges are deceptively simple. Obesity in our children? Turn the television off, get off the couch and go out and play. Come home when the streetlights buzz on. So why don't more of us jump up and down and scream the news that "the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end." (New England Journal of Medicine) Don't you just love academia? So careful and measured. HEY, WE'RE DYING.

But, I am burying my lead. Which is still thus: I have smoked. My brand, no less. My kind, my butts. The 1.0 butts I have smoked before this were not my brand. They tasted good, but were gross; an ashy reminder of what I am doing and why. Not so my brand.

My brand is yummy, so comforting, such a part of home. Can you understand this if you have never been a smoker?

Why now? I'm not sure, but last week I went to a backyard party, a crustacean gathering, homage to all things Swedish. And I haven't stopped thinking about smoking since. There I am, engaged in a conversation, or a book, or an article, or research and it is in the background. Relentless. Smoke. Smoking. Dragging in, blowing out. It is its own presence, a secret conversation I have with myself.

It wasn't like that on the medication, which I stopped, because of stomach pain, nausea, headaches and an inability to sleep. Is that the trade-off? Nausea and non-smoking offset by being a productive writer? Thoughts of a book even, themes, the fiction that has eluded me for my entire 43 years, taking shape in the background. Clean lungs and fiction at the price of sleep?

So, I am faced with the decision of going back on what has classically become (in the purest Pavlovian sense) the dreaded medication. Maybe not in the dosage it is suggested. Perhaps I can cut the pill into a fraction, which will allow me both to resist this devil and be relatively free from the side effects.

There is nothing here, at the end of this column, to wrap things up neatly. If you are still reading, perhaps you have some advice, some words of wisdom, something to offer.

Yours in nausea and sleeplessness.

Suzanne Danforth welcomes the voices of those who have gone before. She can be reached at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.

Quitting: Me Without

By Suzanne Danforth

August 23, 2007 6:00 AM

Real time is not newspaper time. In real time I have quit for 20 days.

In the past few days I have begun to feel like a person who doesn't smoke. Instead of missing the act and all its parts (like visiting the nice people at Cabot Street Market), there is not-missing. I can't go so far to say a there is a fullness, because not smoking remains an absence (best pronounced with a French accent).

I have found myself at times musing over a life without butts and feeling an achy, empty lonely road stretched out before me. Me without. Just me and my shriveling nicotine receptors cranking out nostalgia in a calculated attempt to win my sympathies. My rational brain tells me what this phenomenon is and compensates for it (Don't be pathetic! Life without butts will bring only good things, good health and maybe even running or some other sport I can't sustain right now).

Twenty days has been long enough to have developed a yin to the yang of "the black hole of craving." This new feeling also radiates from mid-chest and is akin to solitude in good company. It is contentment shaded with gratitude for simple things (because contentment without gratitude has an expiration date). It is the abundance of seeds in an heirloom tomato — a promise to cross the seasons. It's a great book and the focus to read it.

This lovely state of being happens to be a great counterpoint to a now near nightly experience of sleep talking, a habit I am primarily aware of because of a tendency to wake myself up, what with all the yelling. Most recently, on a trip north. This was not a welcome thing in a hotel room stuffed with sleeping kids, wet bathing suits and detritus of fudge. It's because of this medication. The literature states "changes in dreaming" in the top four side effects.

This is not the first medication to have influenced my dreams. The first shall be nameless. But let's just say this; it was ineffectual. Those dreams were downright hallucinogenic. To begin with, there was no space-time continuum between sleep and waking. I would lay my head on the pillow and immediately be in deep stage, quixotic sleep. On its own, such immediate slumber wouldn't be such a bad thing, 2-4 a.m. waker-upper that I am. But the dreams, the dreams ... I shudder to recall, not merely their content but a predictably relentless calliope turn to funhouse proportions. And this calliope was no muse of epic Greek poetry; this was Medusa, arisen in my personal night. I lasted about five nights before presenting to my PCP as nutty as Poe.

These dreams are different, tolerable thankfully. Slightly less vivid, but similarly without a union representative to demand they punch out every now and then. When one considers that during my waking hours I am rarely focused on inhaling tobacco into my lungs, yes, tolerable.

By day, I find myself reclaiming what I relinquished (with complicity) all those long years back when the promise of a good life was still a promise and not yet a derailed reality. This little pill just may be the better-living-through-chemicals contract of the '60s. And I'm not a miracle person. I'm the one in my profession who notes the cute marketing name, then asks "but what does the product do?

I'm a process girl. Sometimes painfully so, but ech, that's me. This process is different enough that it not only deserves its own description, but (heck) its own shrine, a living compact to aspire to this feeling, or at least remember it clearly enough in the dead of winter (actual and emotional) to resist the gravitational pull of 'the hole'.

I think I am really giving a quit-claim deed to tobacco, a sayonara, a slip out the back Jack. When you are truly gone, I know I won't miss you. Today I can breathe, today I don't want to smoke. Today I miss it a little bit less than yesterday.

Portsmouth native Suzanne Danforth is a nominee (but not winner) of the Pulitzer Prize some moons ago and band geek from way back, now returning to her roots as a writer. She can be reached at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.

THANKS FOR FEEDBACK

I have received an amazing number and quality of e-mail responses since publication of this column. It has made it less lonely when in the grips of wondering why I have done this, and comforting. Not alone, not alone. To each of you, thanks. Thank you to those long quit for your inspiration and strategy sharing. Thank you to recent quitters for keeping it up! Most importantly, thank you to the strugglers for being kind to yourselves and for the willingness to try, or to try again.

Quitting: Turning to Pills to Stop the Puffs

By Suzanne Danforth

August 16, 2007 6:00 AM

I so enjoyed smoking (note, dear reader, use of the past tense). The dragging-in, holding, blowing out. The something to do with your hands, the time killeron long, and short, drives. The intimacy of sitting down with a smoking friend and sharing thoughts whilst lazy trails envelop you. Goodbye my trusty anxiety quasher.

By my count, I have attempted to quit tobacco five times. Anecdotally, I am in good company. Almost any anti-smoking publication or Web site offers a range of average attempts to quit, but they all differ and none offers actual data. I did dig up a nationwide study conducted in 2002 by state health departments and analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control, showing that 52 percent of respondents attempted once in the prior year to quit. No word on how many succeeded.

Some fun habit, eh? More than half of us try to squirm away on a regular basis. I think this time, though, I have a chance. To wit; I am entering the world of NRT (nicotine replacement therapy). Nicorette, Commit, etc, are all nicotine replacement systems, made to tame the jones in a nicely titrated fashion. They never worked well for me, though, and they taste disgusting. Enter Chantix, a tiny little doctor-prescribed pill I take twice-daily because its chemical composition has nicotine shaped keys to fit the many nicotine shaped locks on the billions of neurons in my brain. Those little dopaminergic whiners, collectively my petit la belle dame sans merci.

Several weeks ago, after one of those weeks life hands you every, oh, five years or so, accompanied by wretched amounts of over smoking, I landed in front of my local pharmacist to buy said NRT and was told about Chantix. So, I called my lovely PCP and laid out my large portion of the cash (nope, not covered by my insurance, which is pretty decent usually) and began taking the pill.

Although I marched in vowing to never take another puff, the pills distributor suggest smoking for seven more days while participating in an online behavior and cognitive modification program. Yowza, I got to smoke for seven more days, it was a long swan song, love letter, au revoir and goodbye to an old friend who had become, in truth, just a monkey. A dangerous monkey at that.

But the strangest thing began to happen during those seven days. I began to actually forget about smoking. For hours at a time. I would suddenly go, oh! Time for a cigarette, but it was a uniquely cerebral action. It did not come from the middle of my chest in the form of my friend the black hole, popping out to propel me toward the pack on a regular basis. It came from the middle of my head. Because I still could, I would then light up, sit down and e n j o y . Ahhhh.

Although there were no outright cravings, I found myself reaching automatically in some situations; while taking a phone call, while driving, while seeing certain people. Sort of like going into the kitchen and flipping on the light; even when the power is out and you know it, your arm still does its job as you pass by that switch.

When my quit day came, I made it all the way through day one. I had one actual craving while home but it was only about a three on a logorhythmic scale, and it passed. I even went out to hear a band. I planned for it like a military strategic maneuver. I did not go early, so I wouldn't be there too long. I rode my bike so I could skedaddle if it got too hard; I "came out" about it to my friends and acquaintances. I found myself at a table overlooking the deck, the place where you can go outside and smoke 'em if you got 'em. Moments after, I found myself looking longingly out at the group gathered there, wispy trails around their shoulders, an easy camaraderie, a scene almost taking on airbrushed qualities of wistful loveliness. I quickly recognized it and shut the curtains to block my view, and instead directed my energy into dancing.

Later, I marveled at the absence of actual craving in this social situation. Craving's contenders for the title of most-likely-to-get-her-to-smoke were nonetheless formidable; desire, wouldn't it be nice, howdy ho I'd sure like to be out there. Absent craving, though, they were just loud bullies and nothing more.

Sure, I miss the little buggers, but I am more hopeful than I have ever been that I will become a non-smoker.

Suzanne Danforth recalls smoking her first cigarette in woods that are now The Woodlands development in Elwyn Park. She can be reached at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.

Quitting: She's really going to quit this time

By Suzanne Danforth

August 09, 2007 6:00 AM

I have tried to quit smoking before. How does the old joke go? I can quit anytime I want — I've done it before. The first time, I was living in San Francisco and smoking, if memory serves, a major national brand. One chock-full of ingredients and additives I wouldn't dream of giving my dog, but which I willingly dragged into my own lungs.

I quickly became acquainted with "the hole," a nearly literal black hole of sorts centered in mid-chest and serving much the same function as the black hole in the middle of our galaxy: to devour all matter, light and (in the case of not smoking) good intentions. It is hard to adequately describe the feeling to someone who has never experienced it. The word would be withdrawal, while the experience is pure longing, a cellular yearn, a willingness to disclaim idols and break promises. I smoked, of course, and did smoking one better. I became a reporter.

In those days, newsrooms (at least our newsroom) were clogged with smoke and ashtrays and scribes frantically sucking on small white stick after small white stick on each deadline day. It is stunning to remember that we smokers were in the minority, but we were allowed to stink up the newsroom anyway. Belated apologies to all my former non-smoking colleagues.

The culture at large aided my switch some years later to a "natural" cigarette, one without additives. States had begun as early as 1975 to enact smoking bans; the term "secondhand smoke" became part of the vernacular; "The Insider" movie was somehow bankrolled and distributed; Marlboro Man Wayne McLaren died of lung cancer and so did Yul Brynner, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We began to become aware of what was in those things, (storax, benzyl alcohol and both gamma and delta decalactone) and, somewhat smugly, began to smoke the natural kind.

Until recently, that is, until now. I am going to quit, for good, for real, forever. There are a lot of reasons; I will write of them another day. Today, I am dreaming of saving money, of taking a deep breath without a vague constriction, of, perhaps if I'm lucky, dodging one of the handmaidens of smoking: cancer, emphysema, vascular disease, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I might even become one of those ex-smokers, a nickname fondly given to my friend Rebecca Emerson, who steadfastly screws up her face and loudly proclaims "Yeccchhhh ...;" each time I light up.

To continue smoking now would require as deft a dance with denial as I could muster, since I am painfully aware that despite the pretty packaging and earth-friendly tobacco farming, I continue to regularly inhale carbon monoxide and countless carcinogens. I implore my nieces and nephew, don't start. Just don't start. For any reason.

It is more than a little humbling to think back to when I started to smoke and remember that it made me sick. Oh gosh, no need to pretty it up, it made me vomit. I was 15, and there was a convenience store on the corner of Dennett Street and Maplewood Avenue, where the medical product supply store is now. The old gentleman who worked there cared not what you bought, and although there were laws, the "must be born before ...;" cards were not yet invented and propped near the cash register.

I can't even remember why I started. Both my mother and my father smoked, a sure predisposing factor. My best friend's mother did too. She and I would greedily buy a pack of ridiculously long 120's, slim sticks, which we dubbed with a name unprintable here, and leave the store to puff and puff and, at first, puke. Later, after our bodies had acclimated to what they had tried in vain to tell us was poison, it was easier.

After it got easier, it became pleasant. In college, smoking even conferred a sort of status on my group. I can see us crowded into a hazy dorm room, grandly smoking and debating those lofty college concepts that stun you the first time you consider them; being, nothingness and the like.

Now there is nothing easy or pleasant about it. I have to make sure I have a pack with me at all times. I have to wash stinky clothes. I have to go outside to partake. I had, before she died, to face my mother every time she was able to formulate the question, "Still smoking?" (It didn't help that she could only think to ask when I actually lit up!) I have to reconcile the fact that I work with lovely children who I could not bear to see me smoke. I have, now, do to one more thing. Quit.

Suzanne Danforth is a Portsmouth native who has smoked off and on since 1980. She is nervous about it, but intends to chronicle her attempt to quit in the Herald. She can be reached at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.