806: I Can't Quit You, Baby
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life. I'm Sean Cole, sitting in for Ira Glass. Late last year, I got some not-so-great health news that kind of scared the hell out of me. Basically, I was diagnosed with mild emphysema, lung disease, and two, what they're calling small benign nodules, one on each lung. It's like scar tissue. I'm trying to focus on the words mild, small, and benign. The cause wasn't mysterious. I'd been a daily cigarette smoker for about 35 years. It used to be a pack a day when I was younger, sometimes more. I'd cut it down to maybe a half or a third of that later on. And I'd been meaning to quit for a long time, but I just never tried to, not really. And now it felt like I had no choice, which, before I tell you what happened next, I feel like I should explain what a huge change that was going to be. I always say, I started smoking when I was 15, and started inhaling when I was 16. Partly, I just wanted to be like the people in the British TV dramas I was watching on PBS, pulling these perfect little white cylinders out of silver cases that snapped shut. I remember I painted an empty metal band-aid container light blue and kept my Salem menthols in there. Puffing at them in my parents' driveway. In my 30s and 40s, I was the guy in the friend group that always had cigarettes. I'd smoked during the shortest of walks, like from this office to the hotel bar across the street. I'd smoked after a 10-mile training run for a half marathon. You smoke in your car, someone would ask, and I'd say, "Yeah, that's why I bought it." Whenever I imagined myself stranded in the woods, or like on a life raft in the middle of the ocean, the panic I felt was about not having enough cigarettes with me. So the prospect of stopping for good always felt like trying to strand myself on purpose. Like everything in me opposed it. The emphysema diagnosis was in early November. I figured I'd put off quitting till after Christmas when I didn't have to work for a bit. Whenever I went too long without smoking, my cognition would slow down to where I could barely think. December 28th, I'll stop, I told myself, and started practically counting down the cigarettes. I recorded voice memos through all of this. This one's from December 21st, a week before quitting day. This is one of the last times I'll be sitting here smoking out the window, looking at the world trade tower. And then I guess going forward, I'll just like sit here, and I don't know, think or something. This is how much of a smoker I was, I didn't even realize that when you don't smoke, you don't have to go and sit by the window. But the thing I'm really here to tell you about is how I was planning to quit. I was going to read a book, kind of the book for people in my situation. It's called Alan Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking. You might have heard of it.
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