A good enough reason to quit

Now I don’t know if anyone remembers this, but one of my New Year’s resolutions was to give up smoking by the end of this year, writes blogger Emma Suddaby.

Well . . . the year’s nearly over and I’d managed to successfully ignore my rash promises until my foot surgeon went and dropped the bomb on me.

He told me that, in his opinion, the reason none of the foot surgery on me ever seems to work is because I smoke. He explained that research has recently revealed that the bone of a smoker is 16 times less likely to fuse than that of a non-smoker.

So basically, he sticks me back together again, I smoke my head off as usual, and within weeks all those skilled and delicate repairs he did for me have come unstuck and I’m back to trying to balance on a couple of bandy claws again.

Of course I whinged and tried to find holes in his expert opinion. But in the end I had to bow to the inevitable. I’ve smoked heavily for 21 years, that’s over half my life. It felt like I was losing an old friend, but what had cigarettes ever really given me except bad circulation?

And meanwhile, one of the best surgeons available is doing everything in his power to reconstruct my feet, to keep me out of that wheelchair a bit longer and he’s telling me in capital letters, as clearly as he can that I have to STOP SMOKING if I want any of it to work.

I felt a bit of a fool. And very ungrateful. And I decided that this was now a bullet that must be bitten. My GP prescribed Champix, a new anti-craving treatment and I ordered, and read a copy of Allen Carr’s (no, not that Alan Carr!) book, called Easyway to Stop Smoking.

And to my enormous shock and disbelief, I stopped. And even more amazing, Allen was right – it actually is easy!

I highly recommend both Champix and the Easyway book to anyone who wants to stop smoking, but I also know you have to get there in your own time. Nothing gets a smoker reaching for a cigarette quicker than advising them to stop.

So there you are, just in the nick of time I’m a non-smoker and I will never smoke again. I can’t believe I spent 21 years doing something I was getting so little out of, for the fear of giving it up.

I’ve always been prone to comfort-zone syndrome, why put yourself through unnecessary suffering when there’s a comfy old rut available to rub along in? But I also keep my promises where possible, so let’s end with another, and this goes out to the smokers out there.

No matter how pleased I am with myself, I will not become that worst of all things – the RRS (Righteous Reformed Smoker). I promise!