Happy as a non-smoker

Another half year passed, and I'm still a non-smoker.
I tried several cigarrettes during the passed half year and just felt the taste is awful.

Smoker is slave

Have you ever realize that you are not enjoying the smoking, but are slaved by the cigarettes? Let me clarify this by a story.

Paul Getty, an oil business man and the richest in the U.S. in the last century, was a heavy smoker. He woke up one night in a small inn, and hoped to take a smoke. Unfortunately, he didn't have one. He was so heavily driven by the desire that he decided to walk 6 blocks to the rail way station to buy a pack. It was rainy and dark outside. So he geared up with the rain coat and got ready to fight with the rain for the small pack of cigarette. He stepped out the door, slogged in the downpour, thunder and darkness. He suddenly found that how ridiculous his behavior was. How could he sacrifice so much to just take a smoke? He realized that he was totally a slave of the cigarette. Indeed, smoking is the best master that every smoker takes the slavery as an enjoyment!

Guess what, Paul Getty laughed at his own stupidness and got back to bed without smoking, and never smoked since then.

He is clever and lucky that he finally got to know the truth of smoking. He found the path through the thick mist, though it is hidden so well.

Quit smoking is not hard at all, if you see the truth through the mist as well.

The last cigarette

You will successfully quit smoking if you drop "the last cigarette".

As a frequent smoking quitter, we always have the thought like, "after the last cigarette, I will quit". Then we smoke the "last cigarette" thoroughly, in an attached emotion. We feel like we are leaving the best friend. Later, for sure we pick up smoking again.

"Last cigarette" is a good example of the confusing of what nicotine tells you, and what your real thought is. The "last cigarette" illusion is what the nicotine creates in your mind, to let you feel that you are sacrificing some benefit, say smoking, to exchange for your health. But the truth is, you are not sacrificing anything by quitting smoking. It is easy if you consider nicotine addiction as an illness. For example, will you feel that you sacrifice something when you recover from a bad headache? Will you try to seriously feel the last piece of headache before it is totally removed from your head? Of course not. The only difference is that headache doesn't bring you the addiction but nicotine does.

Let me tell you my quiting story. I have the last cigarette left in my pocket when I was reading Allen's quit-smoking book. I was so inspired by the book at that moment and decided to quit. I held the last cigarette in my hand and thought, I will finish the last one enjoyingly then quit. However, I suddenly realized that THERE IS NO NEED TO SMOKE THE LAST ONE if I want quit. It is ridiculous that I decide to quit but insist to take the last one. How could the thought of smoke-the-last-one come up in my mind? Of course, it is what my nicotine in my body tells me. Then guess what, I threw my last cigarette in the trash, and feel very relieve. You can never get that kind of relief if you smoke the last one.

Smoking the last one will put something in your subconsciousness, that you are not actively quiting smoking, but are separated with smoking habit, your best friend, by some external force, say the concern to your health. But trashing the last one will make you feel that you actively leave smoking habit, instead of pushed away by some others.

Just trash the last one. After that you will be amazing of the whole new feeling that you never experienced before immediately after you quit, the feeling that is not depressing or losing something as you frequently felt in the past. It is a feeling of fulfillment and rebirth.

Go feel it!

Story of Bryan Lee Curtis

On the day of Bryan's death, June 3, wife Bobbie and son Bryan keep a bedside vigil.

Bryan Lee Curtis, then 33, holds son Bryan Jr., 2, in this March 29 photo. Curtis would die about two months later.

Here is a tragic story I copied from http://rokok-tobacco.blogspot.com.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Cigarette smoke hangs in the air in the room where Bryan Lee Curtis lies dying of lung cancer.

His head, bald from chemotherapy, lolls on a pillow. The bones of his cheeks and shoulders protrude under taut skin. His eyes are open, but he can no longer respond to his mother or his wife, Bobbie, who married him in a makeshift ceremony in this room three weeks ago after doctors said there was no hope.

In Bryan's emaciated hands, Bobbie has propped a photograph taken just two months ago. It shows a muscular and seemingly healthy Bryan holding his 2-year-old son, Bryan Jr. In the picture, he is 33. He turned 34 on May 10.

A pack of cigarettes and a lighter sit on a table near Bryan's bed in his mother's living room. Even though tobacco caused the cancer now eating through his lungs and liver, Bryan smoked until a week ago, when it became impossible.

Across the room, a 20-year-old nephew crushes out a cigarette in a large glass ashtray where the butt joins a dozen others. Bobbie Curtis says she'll try to stop after the funeral, but right now, it's just too difficult. Same for Bryan's mother, Louise Curtis.

"I just can't do it now," she says, although she hopes maybe she can after the funeral.

Bryan knew how hard it is to quit. But when he learned he would die because of his habit, he thought maybe he could persuade at least a few kids not to pick up that first cigarette. Maybe if they could see his sunken cheeks, how hard it was becoming to breathe, his shriveled body, it might scare them enough.

So a man whose life was otherwise unremarkable set out in the last few weeks of his life with a mission.

* * *

Bryan started when he was just 13, building up to more than two packs a day. He talked about quitting from time to time, but never seriously tried.

Plenty of time for that, he figured. Older people got cancer. Not people in their 30s, not people who worked in construction, as a roofer, as a mechanic.

He had no health insurance. But he was more worried about his mother, 57, who had smoked since she was 25.

"He would say, "Mom, don't worry about me. Worry about yourself. I'm healthy,' " Louise Curtis remembers. "You think this would happen later, when you're 60 or 70 years old, not when you're his age."

He knew, only a few days after he went to the hospital on April 2 with severe abdominal pain, how wrong he had been. He had oat cell lung cancer that had spread to his liver. He probably had not had it long. Also called small cell lung cancer, it's an aggressive killer that usually claims the lives of its victims within a few months.

While it seems unusual to the Curtis family, Dr. Jeffrey Paonessa, Bryan's oncologist, said he is seeing more lung cancer in young adults.

"We've seen lung cancer earlier and earlier because people are starting to smoke earlier and earlier," Paonessa said. Chemotherapy sometimes slows the process, but had little effect in Bryan's case, he said.

Bryan also knew, a few days after the diagnosis, that he wanted somehow to try to save at least one kid from the same fate. He sat down and talked with Bryan Jr. and his 9-year-old daughter, Amber, who already had been caught once with a cigarette. But he wanted to do more. Somehow, he had to get his story out.

When he still had some strength to leave the house, kids would stare.

"They'd come up and look at him because he looked so strange," Louise Curtis said. "He'd look at them and say, "This is what happens to you when you smoke.'

"The kids would say, "Oh, man. I can't believe it,' " Louise Curtis said.

In the last few weeks, Bryan's mother has been the agent for his mission to accomplish some good with the tragedy. She has called newspapers and radio and television stations, seeking someone willing to tell her son's story, willing to help give him the one thing he wanted before he died. Bryan never got to tell his story to the public. He spoke for the last time an hour before a visit from a Times reporter and photographer.

"I'm too skinny. I can't fight anymore," he whispered to his mother at 9 a.m. June 3. He died that day at 11:56 a.m., just nine weeks after the diagnosis.

Bryan Lee Curtis Sr. was buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in St. Petersburg on June 8, a rare cloudy day that threatened rain.

At the funeral service at nearby Blount, Curry and Roel Funeral Home, Bryan's casket was open and 50 friends and relatives could see the devastating effects of the cancer.

Addiction is more powerful.

As the graveside ritual ended, a handful of relatives backed away from the gathering, pulled out packs of cigarettes and lit up.