A Smoker’s Diary: The first rush… to getting hooked

Or, so you think you want to quit smoking?

So I had announced in the ‘Do only bad girls smoke post?’ that I was meeting a doctor who’d help me quit smoking. I did go and spend two hours sitting and talking with her. The first thing I learnt? That I don’t have any oxygen in me and the carbon monoxide levels in me are 20 + ppm. For heavy smokers. Also, she asked me if there was any phlegm with my ‘smoker’s cough’. No, there isn’t, which apparently is really bad news because it means the ‘cilia’ in my lungs (little hair that work as filters) are either dead or defunct. Basically, of all the 500 poisons we intake each time we take a puff, ALL are in me.

“How will a doctor help?” someone had asked me, “Quitting smoking is about will power, if you don’t have it, no one can help you quit.” While it is true that the first and most important step in quitting cigarettes is a WILL to quit and the determination to back it… HOW do you quit? Some of us need help with WHAT to do when the urge hits and that’s where Dr Sajeela Maini, PhD in tobacco cessation, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital comes in… Soon enough I would be undergoing a four-day intensive programme with her to get my lungs back. Before that…
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I had my first cigarette on 24th June, 1999. I was standing in the kitchen, the exhaust was on, the windows open, there was no home, but I wasn’t taking the risk. It was a stick of Charms (formerly Charminar, a Hyderabad brand), one of my father’s.

I was interning at a newspaper office and there were many women who smoked there. Two were girls from my college, my seniors by a year. I was curious: What did people like about cigarettes? Since I had seen umpteen movies where people coughed after their first drag and looked like imbeciles, I had decided that my first attempt would be in the privacy of my home. I’ve never been one for making a fool of me in public (unless it’s eyebrows on a TV show!) The cigarette was blackened as I had simply held it between my lips and put a match to it, not knowing that one needed to ‘pull’ in to light a cig properly… It was not a candle.

I thought I was a natural since I didn’t cough. It was only the next day – armed with my first self-bought cigarette – that I learnt that I hadn’t coughed because I was smoking it wrong. All I was doing was taking in the smoke and blowing it right out. There had been no taste and I had wondered, people surely didn’t indulge in it just to exercise just to blow smoke at each other’s faces. Wasn’t there more?

The next day one of the senior girls – as I sat amidst them all ears while they discussed the editor – pointed out that I was smoking ‘wrong’. She taught me how to pull the smoke in, then inhale with my teeth slightly parted. I watched her carefully and emulated. I didn’t cough… My head felt funny, slightly dizzy. Like I had just gotten off a fast spinning merry-go-round. I used as many words to describe what I felt when the senior asked me, “So what do you think?” As I finished my recounting she laughed and said, “Stupid, that’s called a rush.” Her name was Chitra.

I have never felt that rush again, no matter how many cigarettes I smoke in a day. They say the first cigarette after a day’s break from smoking will give you that rush. It’s a blatant lie. Once you get hooked to the habit, you don’t get that rush because habitual smokers will always ensure they never run out of cigarettes, not for a couple of hours and a day’s abstinence will give most smokers palpitations. And that’s the funny thing, I had never expected to get hooked, had never stopped to think I would become an addict.

“No smoker starts out thinking s/he will become addicted,” says Dr Maini. It’s the same pattern for everyone: you start out as a ‘social smoker’, or as an only-lunchtime smoker, or someone who only ‘smokes with alcohol’ or even a ‘weekend smoker’ and sooner or later – unless you stop altogether – you will get hooked. “You are either a smoker or a non-smoker, there are no grey areas, nothing called an occasional smoker,” says Dr Maini, “Even reduced-smoking is a myth.” By ‘reduced smoking’ she refers to people who ‘cut down’ on their cigarettes and think they are doing a brilliant job by going from 20 to two a day. However – and let no one fool you – they are still smokers and they will go back to an increased intake.

That was the first shock for me… I was hoping – like many a chicken-shit quitter – that I would do the gradual reduction. “You cannot reduce and quit, reduction is self-pacifying. Something or the other will get you back to smoking full time. The ONLY way to quit is going cold turkey,” says Dr Maini. And very honestly, it is a bloody scary idea. Not the trying, but the thought of not being able to. What if I fail?

Even as Dr Maini looked me in the eye to gauge the seriousness of my intentions, stories of those who have quit ran through my head. My father, two of his coursemates (one a Major General now) and one of our family friends. All of them quit in a day, they simply threw out the cigarette packets. “The first step is deciding to quit and knowing that you want to stop. I can show you the ways, but the determination is all yours.”

I could not assure her immediately as I started coughing, dry, lung-racking, body-shaking coughs that hurt my larynx. Earlier, my smoker’s cough would hurt my tonsils – right under my jaw – and I would comfortably blame it on season change. Now the pain has shifted and my entire throat, particularly the larynx and chest hurt. It scares me. What if I have… Hmm.

Pictures of lung cancer patients and those who wear a voice-box (cancer of the larynx basically removes the vocal chords and it’s replaced by a mechanical device) suddenly seem far more personal to me…

PS: Tuesday is when I visit the doc and start the programme. Nervous. And yet sickeningly enough, it’s Sunday night and I am smoking as I type this out…