12 Years Unchained!

As the Heartland Health & Wellness Fund Wellness Director, I've had the opportunity to hear remarkable stories about overcoming addictions, weight struggles and overall health issues. It's been a blessing to see the results of the culture the Fund is cultivating not only within the lives of plan participants but reaching out to the families of our members. Making a healthy lifestyle change isn't always the easiest thing to do, but knowing we are all in this together can help.

This week, a plan participant reached out to me to tell me about her 12-year milestone of being smoke free. As I sat down to listen to her story, I knew I wanted to share it with all of you. If you smoke, have ever thought about quitting, have quit or have wondered how smoking impacts your life, I invite you to read this story.

She was in her early twenties when she first tried smoking cigarettes. It started as a social thing--having a cigarette when she was out with friends. She didn't smoke a lot, and never considered it a habit. But life has a way of throwing curve balls that can turn the most innocent of activities into full blown addictions. When her marriage spiraled into divorce, the cigarettes became a coping mechanism.

It's been my experience, that every individual handles stress in a unique way. When I hit a wall, I hit the gym or the trail. I have friends who hit the fridge. I have one friend who jokingly refers to it as "eating her feelings." Sadly, some turn to alcohol or even drugs. There are healthy ways to deal with stress, but this plan participant turned to cigarettes to cope with her stress.

Cigarettes have a little chemical inside them known as nicotine--I think many smokers underestimate its power. Cigarette smoke contains thousands of chemicals. Dozens of those chemicals are harmful. One of the most dangerous is nicotine, a natural part of the tobacco leaf. Nicotine is the addictive drug in cigarettes. And nicotine addiction is what imprisoned this young plan participant. She confessed that her life began to revolve around smoking cigarettes. She planned her whole day around cigarettes. When she got up she had a cigarette, while putting on her makeup she smoked, while heading to work she smoked, on her breaks she smoked, on her way home she smoked, before dinner, after dinner, once she got the kids to bed. It was crazy how much her life revolved around cigarettes.

Remember those little curve balls I was talking about, well she was hit with another. Her mother developed COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) from a lifetime of cigarette smoking. Her mom was in and out of the hospital coping with the disease, but all the while, insisting that the smoking had done its damage and she wasn't going to quit now. At one point, our plan participant crumpled up a box of her mother's cigarettes leading to a heated argument and hard feelings.

I can tell you that you CAN recover from most of the damage cigarette smoking does to your body. It takes time, but research has proven that once you are smoke free for 10 years your risk of smoking-related cancer returns to that of a normal person and after 15 years, your heart normalizes to that of a non-smoker. For her mother's COPD there was no cure, however if her mother had quit smoking, she could have prevented her symptoms from getting worse.

As she watched her mother deteriorate, she couldn't imagine her children watching her suffer in the same way as her mother. She wanted to be around for her kids and her future grand kids. So she made the decision to quit. It wasn't easy and it took numerous times for her to quit. She would quit, then after about two weeks, go right back to it. The straw that broke the camel's back was watching her mother sit out on her front porch attached to an oxygen tank and smoking a cigarette. That made her so angry at her mother--she couldn't understand why she was doing this to herself. Suddenly, the light bulb went on and her eyes were opened, she realized she was doing the same thing as her mother and would end up the same way if she didn’t quit smoking.

Determined to quit, she started changing her routine in small ways. For instance, instead of smoking first thing in the morning, she'd wait until her first break at work. She would change her routine every week, so she wouldn’t fall into the same trap. She did do the patch for a little while, but had a reaction to it and had to stop. She also kept her hands busy doing needle point and peeling oranges. During the work day, she would walk on her breaks with another co-worker, who also had quit smoking, making for a great support system.

After 12 years of being smoke free, she feels so much better and has a lot more energy. Thinking back over her quit smoking experience, she remarked, "It blows my mind that something like a cigarette had that much control over me." Her conviction to quit proved stronger than her addiction to nicotine, and I encourage you to find your strength to quit smoking. 

Although this story has a good ending, life's curve balls keep coming. She lost her mother to COPD in 2012 at the age of 59. However, nicotine had relinquished its hold and she was able to cope with her grief while continuing to live a smoke-free life. 

If you want to quit smoking, I'm here to help. Smoking cessation is a battle you can win.