Quote Originally Posted by blue View Post
Meh...

Im Catholic, the day I decide to quit smoking and drinking Ill go to Church.
I'd say you can come to my church, we'd welcome you, but it's just about as far away as one can get, and it's not Catholic. That doesn't matter to us, we have many former Catholics here ... and we also have NA, AA, OA, and other self-help groups that meet here every day of the week.

Blue, my Dad is an asthmatic, and has been since childhood. He didn't start smoking until he joined the Army at 17, and everyone was given cigarettes on a regular basis. He smoked all through my growing up years, but we were not supposed to know he did. He never ever smoked in the house, and never smoked where we could see him. Like me, he is allergic to cigarette smoke, and apparently they have done studies showing that if you are allergic to something but get addicted to it, it is exponentially harder to quit for physiological reasons.

One day, probably 20 years ago, his doctor discovered a lump on his neck. It turned out to be benign, but he knew that when he was in the hospital for the surgery to remove and biopsy it, he would not be able to smoke. So he quit, cold turkey. This was in the days before all the patches and gums existed ...

And it worked. As he said "I would not have wanted to live with me - or been anywhere near me - for those two weeks, but after the first two weeks, I was over the worst of it."

Thankfully, only my mother was living in the house with him at the time, we were all grown and on our own - or in the military in one case - and my mother was the most optimistic, cheerful and hopeful person you could ever hope to meet, so they made it through those two weeks with killing each other.

He later watched my mother's best friend die from lung cancer and her husband, who was Dad's good friend, die from heart disease, both completely smoking-related. Dad is still in good health, for which we are grateful.

Quit now, okay?