Quitting Smoking

Well here I am, two and a half days of sheer hell later and what can I find to do? Blog about it. Wow, the world is surely tired of the bloggings of ex-smokers - I mean, what kind of boring crap occupies the mind to the extent that it must be blogged out when attempting to counter the effects of nicotine withdrawal?

Nevertheless, allow me to bore you with my rantings. I've been smoking since I was twelve years old. I'm now twenty-six. That means that I have been smoking for almost a decade and a half. Cigarettes were my constant companion through adolescence, through my troubled (OK, my troubles were self inflicted) youth. Through puberty, and yes *sigh* even through pregnancy. When nobody else came through for me, the Marlboro man did. Yes, I know, he's been killing me softly all these years. Maybe it just makes it easier to say goodbye if I give him his dues. Maybe it gives me something to do with my hands besides smoke. Let me just share with you some of my current symptoms:

Headache
Stomach Cramping
Excessive Irritability
Post-Nasal Drip
Hacking Cough
Insomnia


Yeah, this quitting smoking thing is a blast. I had a teacher in high school who made it his mission to educate all of us moron teenagers about the dangers of smoking (most of the kids I went to school with came from lower class neighborhoods on the bad side of town) - he showed us studies, videos, court documents, and testimonials about how addictive and poisonous nicotine was for the user. He asserted that quitting smoking is more difficult than quitting heroin.

Now, let's examine that further shall we? I'd like to think that's true. Call me dramatic, but I like to think that right now I'm suffering more than a heroin addict. At the very least, can we say that my withdrawal symptoms are as bad as those of a heroin addict? What about a crack cocaine user? Crystal meth ? - sure. Anyhow, I realize that my suffering is of a self inflicted nature, and honestly I was a pretty self-aware twelve year old who had been forewarned about the deadly consequences of smoking cigarettes. So here I am, suffering more than a heroin addict ever could (OK, perhaps only AS much, I'm not giving you less than that!) and blogging about it.