Today is my 9th. I've been saying for half a year that I was coming up to my 10th, but that's because I've always been math challenged.
After about six weeks of dual use, both vaping and smoking, my last cigarette was with morning coffee on the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2012, the rest of that day being the only difficult day of quitting. One day of battle, the angel on one shoulder saying "keep going, you can do this", the demon on the other shoulder saying "just have another cigarette, nobody is stopping you".
Sunday morning I woke up knowing I was a nonsmoker, knowing I would never go back. I'd chosen a Saturday to quit, to have a Sunday buffer between quit day and the grim Monday back at work without cigarette breaks, but I felt fine, happy, secure. I vaped at my desk. Nobody cared, except to be happy for me.
From then until now, I have not craved a cigarette. Someone may walk past me with a lit one, and the smell is nostalgic, but not tempting. The strange thing is that lately I have had a couple of dreams in which I am still a smoker, one where I was looking for my cigarettes, the other where I was upset because I'd forgotten to buy them, but those dreams were just subconscious look-backs, not cravings or regrets.
Celebrating 9 years of not having bronchitis every winter, of living in a place that doesn't smell like an ashtray, still with an appreciation of vaping as a miraculous innovation by that brilliant Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik.
I hope good will win over evil, and vaping will not be taken from us by authoritarian government overreach, politicians on soapboxes, hysterical nannies, big tobacco, and pharma which has all the quit methods that don't work. I hope vaping will remain available to deliver more people who are suffering in the grip of demon tobacco, but realistically I know that horrible things are done to people all the time by their governments. Pray for the dead, work like hell for the living, is how the old saying goes.
Congrats on your quit!
