See beyond the smoke screen and want it.

I started smoking whilst in primary school, at the age of 11. In those days you could buy packets of 10 cigarettes very cheep. Too affordable for an impressionable child from a poor family, who desperately wanted to fit in.

In April 1987 I discovered I was pregnant at the age of 32. I already had 3 boys aged 15, 11 & 3, but was excited at the prospect of another. At that time I was smoking 30 plus cigarettes a day and if I had a few drink it would increase dramatically.

Unfortunately, even after going to great extremes to try and stop the inevitable, I had a miscarriage at 16 weeks.

I was reading a gynaecological book, a short time after and it stated that smoking, causes a large percentage of miscarriages. I was devastated and realised that I may have caused the loss of my baby, which I wanted so much. This thought stayed with me.

Shortly after all this, a pamphlet came into our letterbox advertising a free meeting about how to quit smoking, which was coming up in the next week or so. At the time I mentioned to my husband that I wanted to go, then totally forgot about it, until my husband reminded me a few days later.

I am very grateful to his memory because we went to the meeting and were told that we could learn to quit smoking while we were still smoking. The instructor knew our habit. Knew what he was talking about and as far as financially, we only had to come up with 2 payments and the rest was what we were already paying for cigarettes, as we would stop smoking after 5 weeks, so we wouldn’t be out of pocket and then we would start saving heaps because we would be free.

Smokenders was the name of the program and our salvation. We quit smoking on 12 April 1988 and haven’t wanted to smoke since.