Sticking To It

And still sticking them on...nicotine patches, that is. Lots of people tell me that the first few days are the hardest but that's never been my problem. For me, the first few days are the easiest. My sinuses clear up, my cough goes away, I no longer feel like I have a perpetual cold. I feel great. I love it. This is why I don't want to smoke anymore...so I can feel that way all the time.

Then I start to forget how bad it felt while smoking. I still have all the triggers in my life that urged me to light up forty or so times a day. The stress is still there. The hunger for bad food. The boredom. The plain old habit of puffing on a cigarette in conjunction with most of the things I do.

And I start telling myself....."you can smoke a little, you have it under control, you have a free day with dieting surely it's okay to have a free day with smoking". Crazy stuff....stuff that makes sense to the part of my brain that really misses the cigarettes. I woke up at 2am this morning and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. While sitting at the table I glanced at the patch on my arm. Having the patch helps in a lot of ways and one is that, while I am wearing one, I can't smoke or it makes me very sick. Yet, while looking at my arm early this morning, I had the thought "if I take it off now, it will be out of my system by the time I wake up, I can smoke for a couple of hours before putting another back on".

As I said...crazy.

That's addiction for you.