How it all began

As a child of parents who smoked, and a sibling of sisters who smoke, my brother and I made a pact very early on that we would never, under any circumstances, be smokers.  But smoke I did from the age 19 onwards (now 29), much to the dismay of my friends, family and boyfriend at the time.  It's difficult to admit that at the age of 19 peer pressure can still be a trigger to light up a durrie.  It's a cop out and I should have known better, blah blah blah.  It's too late now.  Friends and I were outside a club in Brisbane, waiting to get the doorman's nod to enter when a new aquantance offered me a cigarette.  "Sure," I said, hopelessly drunk and full of bravado.  From that day onwards, against all familial experiences that had gone before, I became a smoker.

When I take stock of my family's experience with smoking and the damage it causes, I feel even more stupid for picking up the habit.  My father had a massive heart attack in his early forties.  I was just a child at the time, too young to realise the enourmity of the situation, let alone understand the cause of it.  It took a quadruple bypass for my father to stop smoking, and even then he returned to it about ten years later.  My mother suffered chronic respiratory problems all through her life - she would smoke a pack of forties a day, even right up to the point she was diagnosed with COPD some 20 years ago.  It took another near death experience, much like my father's, for her to quit smoking.  But here's the rub: even though my mother didn't touch a cigarette for the last 20 years of her life, cigarettes still killed her in the end.  And my greatest fear is that I suffer the same fate.

The two-year anniversary since she shook off her mortal coil has just passed, and each cigarette I light I can hear her fierce Scottish brogue, saying, "Put that oot, 'ya wee b&$#ard!"  She would never have said this to me when she was alive, of course.  Not that my mother was anti-swearing, if anything the opposite was true.  I can hear her now, louder in death than life, condemning me for every puff I take, not wanting the same thing to happen to me as it did her.  The scariest thing about the whole situation is that I'm developing a cough - her cough - the cough I remember her having for so many years that progressively got worse and worse.  In October of 2011, her lungs were ashen, spent and deteriorated to the point that a bout of pneumonia did her in.  And still I won't quit.

But I don't want to do this any more.  The self-despising, the guilt, the anxiety, the money and not least of all the poor health that cigarettes inflict on me daily has to stop.  Today is the day - on the 4th of November 2013 - that I will make this a reality.  I don't want to smoke any more.  I don't want to cough crap up in the shower every morning.  I don't want to give into cravings.  I don't want smoking to me a part of my life.  I don't want to end up like mum.