Hello! Today’s story time is about how I quit smoking in. It was a long road with many bumps along the way.
Foreign my name is shan welcome to shan’s tales and tidbits i appreciate you dropping by today and i’m on a journey to have a happier and healthier mind body and soul and today i’d like to just you know go over my experience with how i quit smoking and the motivations behind that i used to smoke for about 20 to 23 years why did i start smoking to begin with
Uh stupidity for one but i was about 20 years old i was having a party well i was at a party and almost everybody there smoked and it’s about eight to ten twelve people there and we’re all joking around and so many jokes around oh shan doesn’t smoke she’s a goody two-shoe she can’t do it i’m a leo i don’t like being told that i can’t to do something unless it’s
From a police officer you know something might be like illegal then maybe but um i’m kind of hard-headed and if you tell me that i can’t do something i’m i’m generally gonna do it uh honestly i’m gonna put my mind to it and i’m going to do it so i’m at the party and they’re all joking around and i grab somebody’s pack of cigarettes i don’t remember whose it was
And i grabbed their cigarettes take one out and they’re like all laughing at me grab the lighter and i lit it up and i smoked it surprisingly smoked it without too much coughing because somebody that doesn’t smoke generally is going to cough a lot surprised everybody and it’s probably because i’ve always been around a lot of secondhand smokers um pretty much all
My life so they’re all like what i can’t believe that she’s smoking that’s so crazy obviously they didn’t think i’d keep it up so throughout the night i bummed another one from each person you know going around bumming cigarettes from the friends and they’re all like oh whatever laughing at me the next morning i go to the convenience store right and by my old
House and uh bought a pack of newports and a lighter and continue to smoke off and on for a really long time you know through the years i quit smoking off and on i quit smoking once when i started going to church and i had a lot some divine intervention helped me there and another time i had quit from um smoking cessation classes that i had taken through my
Job that that did help it made me accountable the smoking cessation did i had to write down how many cigarettes i smoked in a day and what time that was at and then when i went to the next class they’re like okay you’re smoking so many cigarettes a day you’re smoking them around this time now you can only smoke a cigarette at say it was on the hour it had to be
On the hour it couldn’t be 15 minutes after it couldn’t be two minutes after it had to be at that time if you miss your window you have to wait till the next one so i set my time and if i didn’t get to that time for him to smoke i just didn’t smoke and it took me about a month of doing that that i i did quit smoking and i quit smoking for a couple of years and
Of course i let you know stress get the better of me and being around other smokers really did not help and i didn’t have healthy coping mechanisms i didn’t have anything healthy that i was doing that really helped me stay focused i mean i did a lot of the meditation a little bit and i did a little bit of journaling and i did a little breathing exercises but you
Know i slowly stopped doing those things that really helped me during the smoking cessation the last time that i had quit smoking i had quit smoking from a drug called chantix and that was about 14 or 15 years ago i started taking that medication and it surprisingly it helped me within a two-month time frame i was completely done i had no desire for cigarettes
I didn’t have a lot of the strange weird side effects a lot of other people get from that medication and i later found out that actually it’s derived from wellbutrin and while butrin has always helped me with my attention deficit so which i didn’t even know that i had until about two months ago and that medication strongly helped me so why i started smoking again
After that three-year period that i had quit from the chantix is that i had to have back surgery for a second time and i was terrified absolutely terrified there was more of a possibility of paralysis because of scar tissue so i had a family member over at the house and they were like oh when do you go in for surgery and i was like i go in on this date um and
They were like okay well um she was smoking a cigarette i said hey can i can i have a cigarette to calm my nerves she’s like are you sure you really want to do that i’m like yes i’ll be fine don’t worry i’m not going to start smoking you don’t even smoke the kind that i like anyway so i smoked two of her cigarettes she left about three hours later i begged my
Husband to go to the convenience store and buy me a pack of cigarettes and of course a lighter because i didn’t have one and i did this right before i had surgery which you’re supposed to quit smoking before you have surgery but i had started smoking surgery was successful and fine by the way didn’t have any major complications other than me trying to go back to
Work too soon so last year on may 26 of 2021 i heard three words from my doctor that literally changed my entire life those three words were you have cancer you have endometrial cancer and i later found out i also had ovarian cancer and cancer on my fallopian tube she was like you need to have surgery we need to remove your omentum and make sure we get some lymph
Nodes make sure nothing has spread to your lymph nodes so even though i’ve had the full hysterectomy six months prior to this because we didn’t know that i had cancer then i’m having surgery and she’s like you really really need to quit smoking especially at your age there’s more risk of complications because i was one month shy of turning 43. and she strongly
Suspected suspected suspected that i was diabetic even though i had not formally been diagnosed with that yet i was a month later but anyway so i had that surgery and then two weeks later i had a chemo port installed but the day that i quit smoking was three days after i heard those three words i had my last cigarette on may the 29th of 2021 around 11 a.m i
Threw the rest of the pack away i think i had one or two left in there i threw it away and i have not smoked a cigarette since so hearing the words you have cancer it really does something to your brain it makes you sit back and reevaluate your life especially with being diabetic and now having to really be a lot more careful being so young i made it through the
Surgeries safely but i wanted to make some lifestyle changes as well so about three months ago i’ve started exercising my doctor had to put me on an additional diabetes medicine which i wasn’t quite happy about but it’s helping and i’m hoping to get to the point where i will reverse the diabetes altogether because it’s type 2 and i’ve started exercising and i’ve
Started eating much healthier and significantly reduced by carbs going on more of a keto style of diet also significantly reduced my sugar intake as well but if you’re struggling with quitting smoking you can do it i quit cold turkey no help no gum no patches no lozenges nothing like that i just said i’m done i was scared but i could not let fear override my
Health anymore i i was like i’ve got to make some changes so i know if i can do it you can do it too it doesn’t matter if you’ve been smoking for 60 years i truly believe that you can do it it’s just one at a time laying off one cigarette at a time and you can do it thank you for listening to my story just remember you can only take one step at a time on this
Journey that we’re on to a happier healthier mind body and soul i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day
Transcribed from video
Quitting smoking By Shan’s Tale