GareK's Garret

Alright then - BT wants to use laws against us? I say we should use the Constitution in our own favor.

Apparently Camel and Kool brands of sickarettes are what is helping Reynolds American to stay afloat and, therefore, those will be the brands this BT company markets the most.

I'm going to find a graphics artist who can create a caricature of a camel with emphysema and another one of a person dying of cancer in a hospital bed with a Kool t-shirt on.

It is freedom of speech after all, and the last I heard, that is a right that's protected under the Constitution of the United States.

:-D

I think I'm more in shock than anything else at the moment. I've been reading some of the court decisions as pertains to BT (Big Tobacco) and I'm totally flummoxed. This is justice?

I suppose I really shouldn't be surprised about a politician, former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, representing and making argument for mercenary reasons. That's what politicians do. But I thought the justice system was supposed to be above all that.

Naive of me, isn't it?

In March, 2003 Madison County judge Nicholas Byron ordered a judgement for compensatory damages against Phillip Morris. The argument against BT was that the companies advertised "light cigarettes" as being less harmful. Obviously, there is no such thing as a less harmful cigarette. Ergo people had been misled about a product and enticed to buy it on false pretenses, and as a result were placed in harm's way.

So now the judgement against the BT companies is reversed because, and I quote...

The state Supreme Court ruled in a 4-2 decision that the Federal Trade Commission specifically allowed companies to characterize their cigarettes as “light” and “low tar,” so Philip Morris did not improperly mislead customers about the health impacts of its cigarettes.

“If the FTC has specifically authorized the use of the terms .... PM USA [Philip Morris] may not be held liable under the Consumer Fraud Act, even if the terms might be deemed false, deceptive or misleading,” Justice Rita Garman wrote for the majority.

Alright -- so tell me, who the hell do we have to go see to get this nonsense stopped!?!?! Who the hell do these people think they're fooling? What, does the FTC have to reverse its wording and issue a different statement? WHAT!? Just tell us and we can get the ball rolling!

I'm absolutely stunned at the lengths people will go in order to be obtuse enough to escape making a decision that is actually right rather than politcally correct. And no, I'm not talking about a question of morality, I'm talking about what is RIGHT.

If I developed a product, and in order to use that product as intended one would have to ignite it - and I had created this product so cleverly that, when ignited, the chemicals inside my created product would cause chemical addiction - documented and with no doubt or room for question my product caused a chemical addiction when used as intended - it wouldn't see one store shelf.

Why? Because the FDA would ban it from being sold. As they rightfully should! Barbituates exist for a purpose, but you're not able to legally walk into a local shop and buy them without a prescription. Why? Because when used as directed, they can become chemically addictive. A licensed physician has to prescribe them to you and oversee their use.

How do BT Companies escape this type of regulation?

It's time to quit worrying about political correctness and how many jobs will disappear. The salient point is that lives are disappearing because these products are chemically addictive and are made to be even more so than they would be if sold in pure tobacco form!

Wake up people! We're talking lives! Let's see - do we rule in favor of 2 million jobs, or in favor of 2 million lives?

DUH!

I know I'm displaying more irritability than I typically do, especially with my BL. I do feel, however, that I'm not displaying irritability over irrational things. Example. Last night I went to Sears and got a really great bedspread for our new King sized mattress. It's beautiful and I got it on sale and spent much less than BL gave me to spend for the item.

So, to celebrate, I went to the Chinese restaurant nearby and got 2 orders of shrimp w/mixed veggies. We love that meal and it's healthy. Brought it all home, BL ooohhh'd and aaahhh'd over the bedspread and went back to studying. I ate part of my meal and decided to save the rest for my lunch for the next day.

BL finally decided to break for food and ate part of his dinner. He's on a very strict diet regime, as he's battling obesity. So it didn't surprise me that he kept his portion small. He didn't go back for seconds when he'd finished his plate, so I took his left-overs and dumped them into the same container as mine, thinking "Tomorrow I'll have a nice big lunch..."

About an hour later, BL gets up and takes out the left-overs, heats them up and begins gobbling them in the kitchen. I'm wondering why he doesn't just come and sit down with me, but whatever. Eventually he does. The plate of food is now half gone, and I think that maybe he was just trying to be sure nothing spilled on the carpet or furniture.

Here's where it gets interesting. After he sits down he offers a bite to me. I've gained enough weight on this Quit that I don't need to be thinking about eating second helpings of anything, so I declined. Politely. I believe my exact words were...

"Oh, no thank you."

Said with a smile. But he kept pushing a full fork at me. "C'mon just one bite." and pouting like if I didn't eat with him, I'd hurt his feelings. WTF! We've talked about this about a million times. That's a horrible thing to do to somebody, pressuring them to overeat or indulge in something when they really don't want to.

It's one of the ways that people help contribute to other people's obesity. He knows that. He's seen it in action enough, especially when at our friend's restaurant, the folks look so hurt if you don't have dessert. Before he began his food management program, he'd give in to that time and time again because he didn't want to hurt their feelings.

So we've talked about this a number of times, and we promised never to do that to one another. And there he is, sticking his fork under my nose and pouting like I've rejected him and not the food he was offering.

Well, I'm not sure I said anything particularly nasty but I am certain I had a disgusted, annoyed look. He made me say "no thank you" several times and each time I kept getting more and more annoyed. I don't have anything close to a poker face. So I'm sure it translated.

So much going on with us right now. I don't understand it. He said to me recently,

"You've been very hard on me the last seven weeks."

Have I? And I'm perfectly willing to admit I am not the patient, forbearing person I typically am right now, as I'm the kind of person who very much wants to better myself and make things right if I'm messing up. But have I really been all that much harder on him?

Or has he been setting himself up for me to snap at him. Or is it a mixture of both? I'm aware that we who smoke tend to hide our emotions behind our smoke screens. But am I wrong to think that, last night anyway, BL set himself up big time to get me annoyed with him? Is he doing that so he'll have an excuse to fail?

I don't know. I don't get it. I don't want us to fail. I feel that our relationship is in great jeopardy right now. And I feel like I'm being blamed for that.

I have been quit for 54 days (1 Month, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, 9 hours, 32 minutes and 17 seconds). I have saved $164.54 by not smoking 598 cigarettes. I have saved 4 Days, 13 hours and 38 minutes of my life.

The last couple of days have been very rough. The raw emotional upheavals between my BL and I have left me feeling very vulnerable and weak, and of course that is when the Inner Addict knows there's at least a shot at getting fed again. I sat on the couch and cried most of the day yesterday, just because I'm so tired of fighting it all.

Then today somebody comes into the forums on the Q and shares his diagnoses of small cell lung cancer which, of course, is the fast-moving, hard-to-cure kind. He's a young dad - still had two daughters in high school. Can't imagine his pain, or the pain his family is facing. He left a link in his post to a support group for people diagnosed with lung cancer, trying to help people weak in their resolve to keep their Quit.

I followed the link.

There's a whole forum dedicated as an "obituary" where you can post a death announcement when one of the members crosses over. So of course I sat there reading them all - tears streaming down my face - missing my Mom so bad I can't even think.

Cancer is so evil. It takes moms away from their babies and leaves those little ones in the hands of foster families who only want them for the income. It tears families apart and makes kids grow up skewed in attitudes and negative resignation and following unhealthy emotional patterns.

If you've ever wondered what would happen if you got cancer and had to leave your kids behind - just drop me a line. I'll be happy to spell it out for you.

I'm so heart-sore today. My emotions are as raw and ragged as they've ever been. I don't want to be depressed anymore. I prefer laughter and joyous celebration of what we have, rather than looking back at what we may have missed or what we won't be able to have in the future.

Why doesn't my BL seem to be able to understand what his self-abuse does to me?

I'm very thankful that I planned ahead for craving days. Last night was just miserable, and the fallout from it has lasted throughout the day. I'm sure I've gained at least 4 pounds today, munching away the cravings and the frustration that I've felt growing stronger. I suppose it has finally come to a head.

Never let it be said that quitting smoking isn't a magnificent opportunity for personal growth beyond breaking an addiction. I've learned a great deal about myself. A great deal. Some of it is pretty tough, because there are issues I felt I had already conquered that, apparently, have only been masked and not sufficiently addressed.

I don't deal well with negativity, for instance. They say that you learn a lot about a person by the way he handles a tangled string of lights at Christmas-time. I've always felt that to be true. Raising the girls, I've always felt it was important to have "projects" to work on with them. Some of our projects worked out well and we came through them with a fantastic end result. Some were less than wonderful products in the end, and presented challenges we were ill equipped to overcome.

Regardless of the outcome of the product, however, we always had a great time doing the projects themselves. Mind you, this might involve coming home from work after an agonizingly horrid day in which nothing went well at all. A couple of times, it was after such a day that also terminated in an injury at work requiring a trip to the emergency room for stitches. Still, promises made should always be kept and so I'd go home gritting my teeth, determined to work on our project together with the girls.

And it always cheered me up, if I let it. All I had to do was thwack my thumb with a hammer or paste a sequin to my nose or something equally ridiculous and instead of cursing, raging, getting angry or even just pouting, we'd all have a big laugh about it. The more it hurt, the harder I would laugh. It made the pain go away faster and it made the evening fun for everybody.

Well, last night we had a project, my Sweetheart and I. And, apparently, he had a horrible time of his day before coming home to work on the project. To his credit, he didn't try to welch out of working on it though. And the project itself - whoa! A new king-sized Sleep Number mattress! Okay, so what was required was to take 3/4" plywood and create a larger platform to sit atop our existing queen-sized platform bed.

Yes, there were many challenges. But it could have been fun. We could have laughed through any of the mishaps we encountered. True, his falling was alarming, especially considering his back problems. But once we established that he was going to live, we could have had a simply magnificent time of the whole ordeal.

Guess what happened instead...

Time is flying by too quickly. I can hardly believe I've been quit nearly 50 days. But so I have! I'm posting my free QuitMeter at the bottom of the "short post" portion today so you can see.

I was doing some more Quit Reading, exploring some of the ideas that people were expressing, etc. and came across a new gal who had her epiphany about being "done". And that's it - that's what it takes I guess. That brilliant moment that shines in the mind so brightly you can't see anything else. That moment that says "This is it, there is no other option."

The way I feel about it, see, is that I'm a coward. A true, dyed in the wool, lilly livered yellow bellied coward. In order to do this successfully, then, I had to have no other option but to do it. But I don't want to wait until I get cancer or some other horrid diagnosis (because, after all, I'm pure D chicken). So - I had to quit now, and I had to be sure I knew that I had no other option.

And it is working for me. I'm like one of those pups you see whose owner can put a magnificent doggy feast down on the floor right in front of its nose and it won't move. It knows it has no option - until it is given an option it cannot move. I am that dog! And there IS no option to be given, so you can put your sickarettes down right in front of me and there will be nothing that will make me move toward them.

I don't want them. I can't have them. I've taken that option out of my thinking. Now if I have a smoking thought or even a true crave, it's no big deal. It isn't a matter of "Can I get through this without smoking?" It's more like, "*sigh* Here we go again - I hope this doesn't take long, I have work to do."

And my Inner Addict knows its beat. It really doesn't even try anymore. Once in a while, the pitiful creature rears up and makes itself known. But I'm not giving in to complacency any more than I'm giving myself any option to smoke. So it just does this "I'm still here." thing to check in every once in a while, just so I remember I once was ruled by the whims of its fancy.

Can you believe that? I was once ruled by that pitiful creature!

QuitMeter Counter courtesy of www.quitmeter.com.

heh heh heh...

It more or less dawned on me today that I've really quit smoking. LOL I know that may sound funny to anybody who has walked these 44 days with me, but it's true.

At the Q there's a saying. "Fake it till you make it." In other words, even when you don't feel like you're happy about quitting - act like you feel happy about quitting. Well, I've been acting (at times) like I'm a non-smoker. Most of the time I've acted like I'm an ex-smoker. It's one of those things you know already that can still sneak up on you and surprise you.

I'll be sitting in the truck, going somewhere with my Baby, and all of a sudden I realize I'm not even thinking about having a smoke. It's like "Oh! I really am doing it..." That's the ex-smoker kind of attitude. But a non-smoker kind of attitude is more like...

"Why on earth would I want to do a thing like put a paper tube full of poison in my mouth, light it on fire, and inhale the noxious fumes and toxic gasses it produces deep into my precious lungs?"

I also got to thinking the other day, trying to figure out why this has gone so much more easily for me than I believed it would. I think I may have been talking about the reason all along, without realizing that I was talking about myself. Remember, I'd been the closet smoker. I could go hours and hours, sometimes even days and days, without smoking.

When I thought about that, I realized that I could do that because I always gave myself a specific time when the waiting would be over and I could smoke. "You can have a smoke at 7 tonight. You can hang on till then..." That kind of thing. I'd be just find from that point until about 6 pm. From 6 until 7, time ticked by so slowly I'd just want to cry.

Now I'm writing in forums and encouraging people not to give themselves the option to smoke. "Don't give yourself an out!", I write... "Starve the Inner Addict!". and "Smoking is NOT an option!" You've probably already seen where this is going, but I swear I didn't see it till the other day. Guess that's part of the blinders an addiction imposes on the addicted person.

See, I was telling myself, before I quit, that I didn't have to have one until a specified hour. I didn't have to even think about it, because there was no way to smoke before that specified hour. There was... no option at all.

I had been practicing quitting all this time without realizing it! All I did differently now is that there is no smoking. The hour I can next have a smoke is never. So I don't have to think about it, stress about it, worry about it, or even care about it anymore. There's no option at all, so there's no overwhelming cravings or feelings.

I once spent four days in a hospital. Didn't think about a smoke until an hour before they let me out the door. Why did I not think about it until an hour before I got outside? Because I knew I wasn't allowed to go outside. Because, until 1 hour before I was released I didn't know I was going to be released.

Once I knew I was going to be released, the waiting was unbearable. Because at that point, I gave myself permission to think about smoking. I knew as soon as I was outside I would smoke, and soon I would be outside, ergo soon I would be smoking. Funny how the mind works.

Anyway - I give myself no option to smoke anymore. It's not a choice. It's not among the list of possibilities. Not One Puff Ever.

Wow - Day 40 already. Seems like the time is flying by now. The first two weeks of my Quit, every minute felt like an eternity. Now that I'm settling into my Quit, it's more or less life as usual, which for a person my age means the fast-forward button is in full effect once again.

Another nice thing I've been noticing a lot lately is my return to a productive state of being. Don't ever let anybody tell you that it's fun to be unproductive. Not if you have the kind of personality I do. I don't want to be stressed, I don't need a boss yapping at me, and I sure don't want to have to do it all alone again. But I like working at the things I've chosen to do for a living. Strike that - I don't just like it. I need it!

I've built two sites in less than a week. That's pretty wonderful. I've kept up with my SEO work. That's really wonderful. And I've taken care of my real estate agent client who uses me as her administrative assistant. That is fabulous! If every week were as productive as this last one was, we'd have no money problems whatsoever.

Another thing I've been noticing is that I have dryer skin now than I did before I quit. I have no idea if that's because of the current weather trend here or if it's truly Quit related. We usually have had about 4 inches of rainfall by this time of the winter. We've had lest than .35 inches. That could have a great deal to do with it.

Yesterday was the Superbowl and we had such fun here with the new surround sound theater system. The game was SO SLOOOOOOW during the first half, but the halftime show was pretty good (thanks Mick for all the years of great rock) and the second half picked up nicely. I thought the refs made some bad bad calls, but that's nothing new.

I made lettuce wraps and hot tea and snuggled up with my Sweetheart and we had ourselves a pretty good time. He asked me to let him know when he could have a cigar in the house without bothering me. It's always going to bother me. But it was sweet of him to ask anyway. I told him cigar smoke doesn't make me crave because it literally stinks to high heaven, so I didn't care.

I think was he's reacting to is that I've had a really tough week and it has been apparent in my whole demeanor that I'm struggling a bit. The stupid thing is, I'm nervous, I have anxiety, I can't relax my muscles, but I seriously would not smoke if you put a sickarette in front of me. It's withdrawal of some type, but it isn't really "craves".

Last Monday was a crave day, but the rest of this, I think, is just my body detoxing. I have noticed that I'm pretty touchy, though, and there are things bothering me that I thought had been resolved. Apparently I need to revisit some of these "closed" issues and try to figure out why they bother me so.

For instance, my friend Karen, a real estate broker, asked me why my Sweetie didn't want to marry me...

The step down from 14 mg to 7 has been the most challenging time of my Quit since I conquered D3. Having said that, I'll also say this week, though challenging, hasn't been one quarter the shock to me that D3 had been. I think this is because I'm staying ready for anything.

D1 and D2 were exciting days. It's even possible that I was so ramped about my actual Quit Date arriving and doing what it was I'd been wanting to do for so long, I really flew through the first two days on adrenaline. Quite possibly, was the first day I allowed myself to actually feel the effects of starving my addiction to death.

But I'm past a month now, and even though my Quit has been as kind to me as a summer's breeze, I've remained watchful. This week has been the payoff. It's still challenging. I still know I'm quitting - really alot! But I'm not shaky in my resolve and I'm not tearing out my hair. I was, more or less, ready for this week.

I can't stress it enough. If you are quitting, prepare yourself. I don't want you to read that in a doom and gloom kind of voice - I mean that in a "boy scout motto" kind of voice. Somebody or another once said "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." That goes double for nurturing a Quit.

Believe that statement. Even if you have to postpone your Quit Date for a while to prepare - you're much better off if you do so. Part of devising your plan is to create your Quit Kits, your list of methods of dealing with craves and waves, creating your Flash Cards, gathering a support system, both in 3D (real life) and online, and preparing your loved ones for the roller coaster ride.

Another part of the planning stage is to educate yourself. I did what I considered a great deal of studying about quitting, and I can tell you now, 34 days in to my Quit, I didn't study as extensively as I thought I had. Fortunately, I found the Q within the first week of my Quit, so I got to catch up with a good support group taking every step along with me. I will always hold the Q'sters high in thankfulness and praise. What a tremendous help my Quit Buddies have been, and the Q-mmunity at large as well.

So, study and read and research and read and study some more, go to the Q and begin talking with people well before your Quit date because you'll learn more from people in the middle of a Quit than you ever will anywhere else. While you're there, learn about preparing your tools and your Quit Kit, etc. And no matter how kind your Quit is to you, no matter how long you go thinking "This is easy..." - stay vigilent and your Inner Addict won't have a chance to trip you up.

Enough advice! Somebody in forum said that they thought California was going to ban smoking altogether, even in the privacy of your home. I'm going to Google that right quick to see if there's any truth to it... Click the "more" link to see what I found out!

Yeah, I know -- I haven't posted in many moons. But to be fair, if you refer back to one of my first posts, I did mention that posting less is a sign of a healthy Quit! So don't be upset, it just means things have been going really well.

There is great wisdom in coming together with other Quitters to bolster each other and gain strength from one another. There's another really excellent reason to "talk" with others about quitting -- you learn lots of stuff you wouldn't have known otherwise. There is so much we learn from people who have already gone through what we're going through.

So it's no surprise when I stumble across something at the Q that just makes me enormously thankful I have that spot to turn to. First off, today I have been having some smoking thoughts. I stepped down to 7 mg patches last weekend. But we were celebrating two things, my birthday and our 2 year anniversary, so I think the NicoTurd coulda come up to me and spit in my eye and I wouldn't have flinched. I was just having too good a time.

This is "D3" of this level on the patch. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, as bad as D3 of my Quit was. But I'm being very cautious and staying close to the Q in case I need to shout out for help. Yes, I feel that shaky.

It really helps settle my nerves to read what others who have Quit have written. Here's something that I can share, though not written by me (I'm not experienced enough to write something like this yet) and it may help others who are thinking about or in the middle of a quit. It's an outline of the stages of a quit and what is likely to occur at various points along the way.

I believe strongly that each of us has his or her own unique Quit. This isn't something to tell you what you WILL experience, but a general guideline in case you need it along the way. My Quit has been extremely kind to me, but I find myself needing to understand things from time to time. So this Stages outline may help you...