Round one - the first descent into Hell

I have smoked regularly since I was 15 years of age. In an adventure that would be amusing were it not so fucking serious, a lifelong friend and I snatched a pack of my Daddy's Winstons when she spent the night with me once. That idle afternoon, we ducked into a low calf-feeder in the pasture and smoked the whole pack over brief period of time. Most kids would have emerged green and staggering. Not us. Our parents smoked. For me at least, the experience was like coming home. I've been home ever since.

I first noticed serious dependency after my oldest daughter was born. My ex-husband stole my truck and I could not leave my mother's house with the week-old baby for several days. Although I never quit smoking with either of my children, I lived as cleanly as I could otherwise during both pregnancies. Stranded and alone with that first new baby, though, I lived on cigarettes, upping my daily intake from my then normal half-pack to my current two-pack a day problem. I didn't justify the increase. Smoking to me is like breathing. If I was conscious of one thing, it was that a quickly burned cigarette kept me from eating, even when I probably should have just gone ahead and consumed whatever I wanted.

Over the years, I became aware that cigarettes were an ingrained part of our culture. EVERYONE i know smokes, has smoked, has resumed smoking or wants to quit smoking. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have never smoked. My mother is dying of emphysema. The father of the friend with whom I began the habit has just passed into the age where he will no longer be considered a priority for a lung transplant. Another friend's husband just passed away before 50 of lung cancer caused by long term smoking, as did my high school basketball coach, whose original passport to hell was stamped with Multiple Sclerosis.

I never really considered quitting smoking. I just can't seem to understand the concept. Oh, one of my two best friend quit...three times...but she still smokes. The other best friend quit when she was young but now smokes again. In addition to my mother, my father also smokes, as do his brothers, his sister, most of their children and a lot of their grandchildren. My oldest daughter is about to turn 20 and she has quit smoking three times that I know of. My only nephew has taken to smoking. My sister-in-law smokes more than I do although her father quit. When I see my old high school buddies, most of them are either in remission or actively smoking. Although I have spent short amounts of time with non-smokers, I have never been in serious physical proximity to others who do not smoke.

Until I thought about it, I never understood how insidious the addiction to nicotine is. Worse than meth, they say, and definately harder to manage than whiskey. Once I bothered to analyze it, I realized that I viewed smoking like the color of my eyes. I am still working on considering it an addiction. Although I can actually say the words, they seem the property of that part of the liberal, white establishment who worship their children idiotically, exercise to distraction, make money and "behavioral modifications" without suffering, eat nothing greasy and sit in judgment on me and people like me as easily as they prattle about global warming and art galleries.

Bad outlook? Hell yes. Giving up cigarettes is to me losing the one thing that has never let me down. I have already referenced my initial transition from recreational to chronic smoker. Just before that, during protracted labor birthing my oldest daughter, my doctor asked me how he could make me comfortable. I said I wanted a cigarette, so there in the labor room, he had my mother share hers with me. That was 1987 and the Hegemonites mentioned above would have shit in the floor, I'm sure.

How could I have survived that first beating my husband gave me without pondering my existence on the front porch with a cigarette? When I shot the door off the house to warn him off, I sighted the gun through the haze of the smoke of the cigarette clenched in my teeth. How could I have analyzed my way through subsequent beatings without my comfortable addiction?

On the night that my littlest daughter came into the world, I made sure she was whole and then called a friend, a fellow smoker, who came to the hospital to push me outside in a wheelchair to offer me one of her own smokes. Nicotine later eased my divorce and the fact that I would forever face the world alone with two children. When my gallbladder went south and I was near perishing, in the hospital and willing to risk everything for a cigarette, an old smoking nurse cocked her head at me, said that smoking wasn't against the law and joined me for a cigarette in my room as the rest of the damned place looked on in disgust but could really do nothing about it.

I suppose they could do something now. Maybe I could be incarcerated in the "Idiots who Smoke" prison. I'm not sure where that is but I never want to do oversight there.

But I still don't want to quit despite the fact that doctors won't treat what ails me, attributing everything to the fact that I smoke. I've considered lying but again the Hegemonists haunt me. I am less than they are and they somehow have access to my permanent record, I'm sure. I went to the gynecologist a few months back for a female problem. That makes good sense, does it not? As the doctor used my south entrance to check the viability of my tonsils, she prattled on about smoking, as if my female parts had no meaning. With her hands way further than anyone else had been, she asked, "Do you want to quit smoking?"

"Not at this very moment."

The attitude persists. I simply cannot help it. I have lost everything, reduced myself to simple and nothing and now I have to quit smoking, still manage not to drink whiskey, never eat a bite of food and still go to work every day.

But I must quit smoking, right?

So I began to research the subject, which they say is the first step. As a part of my research, last year, I visited the State of Oklahoma's Corporate Assistance Program and was advised that my blood pressure and blood sugar would likely become out of control when I quit smoking and I should only do it in a controlled medical environment. Give up that idea, I thought. I only need you guys to pronounce me, not to entertain me for 28 days. I learned that basic deprivation is free. Assisted Yankee deprivation is very expensive and basically out of the reach of this poor Indian girl.

Months later, my doctor insisted upon treating my ear infection with a prescription of not smoking. Willing to be hung with a diagnosis of depression (which may come back to haunt me although I won't deny I am probably depressed - the less they know about you the better), I took Wellbutrin during a bad period of my life and wished I hadn't. Nothing happened with the smoking, probably because I never connected it to my life.

And I still haven't. I can't understand what it means to quit smoking. I can't logically connect it with death.

But still I read. And in reading, I tormented most of my friends with my lack of understanding and the anger that produced. I felt sorry for this in a kind of distanced way. Non-smokers don't understand smokers and smokers don't need friends. They have cigarettes.

My reading told me that the logical way to quit smoking was to join a support group (no doubt made up of Hegemonists and Yankees), plan for the quit date, throw away your ashtrays and cigarettes, tell everyone that you are planning to quit, get yourself heavily medicated and then stop smoking. Avoid triggers, the material reflected, such as caffeine and stress. Exercise and pray. Stay away from smokers.

LOL. I can't go to work without caffeine. My life IS stress. Breathing is a trigger. There is no time to exercise. I don't pray and everyone I know smokes. I'm thinking the world consists solely of pigfuckers who probably all smoke but who are paid under the table by the American Lung Association. Maybe the only honorable thing is to make a decision, over time, to live or die.

But then I read this article in an English newspaper. Most planners don't succeed, it said. The most successful quitters (and I don't really want to quit) are those people who simply stop smoking suddenly with no advance notice.

I made the decision to abruptly try to think about quitting last night around 9:30. Even that thinking pissed me off but I was determined to at least reach out and touch the issue. I admit a deep-rooted and probably terminal psychological addition to nicotine. Still, I had my ex-husband's medication and only planned to defer a cigarette until noon. How sick would not smoking make me? How hard would it be?

I never get up at night to smoke and I didn't last night. I went to bed at 10:30 pm but was awake by 2:00 am for the night, tormented by thoughts of what the morning would bring. I never slept again but I did prepare myself. I would get up, suck a nicotine lozenge and try to make it until noon, when I would get as many cigarettes as I wanted.

I had my first panic attack at 4:30 am. What is this? I'm not getting divorced, I'm simply giving up my life. No biggie. By 5:00 am, I tried the first lozenge.

It burned and did nothing at first. I tried to listen to the muses but they all smoke and were apparently asleep. I kept the lozenge in my mouth. 5:30 am and I have to get ready for work. I am vague and want to go back to bed. I don't care for this. I want a cigarette. I don't want to quit. I want to see smoke, smell smoke, trail smoke. The lozenge tastes like maalox and every fiber of my being wants to spit it out. And I've chewed tobacco every chance I get.

I take my pressure. 160/115. Hmmmmm. Sugar is 175. I haven't had readings like that for years. Are the pigfuckers right? I've been ten hours without a cigarette. I immerse myself in a tub of hot water, taking a bath before work. The world goes crazy, my body rebels and I heave up nothing, including the damned pill. I vomit and vomit and vomit and....

Then I felt better. Fuck noon. I smoked and then went to work as usual. At 10:00 am, I did vitals again. Sugar at 90; BP 115/79. My hair stood up all day, worrying, I guess, about what I planned to do to myself. The problem is, I normally smoke two packs a day. When I don't think about this obsession, I am slightly less than normal. I had to fight three packs today.

This was round one, my first descent into Hell. I will try again tomorrow. Isn't it better to die?