What a couple of days!
Well, I’ve had an interesting couple of days! I stopped smoking on Thursday
morning. I worked for about 6 hours, and had a really bad headache and
decided I needed to go home and take a nap, and pamper myself. I did just
that, and at 9:00 pm I was thrilled to have gone 24 hours without a
cigarette. Friday morning, I woke up, thought about a cigarette, and used my
morning ABC to remind myself that what I needed was to brush my teeth,
shower, and eat a healthy breakfast. I was in the middle of doing that, when
I heard a noise outside, and looked out to see my neighbors home on fire!!
Long story short, we got them out, and stood and watched as the house burned
almost completely. There were lots of people standing about outside, and the
adrenaline had just started winding down, and a different neighbor walked up
to me while smoking. I immediately said “Give me one of those!”, which he
did. I smoked that without even thinking about it, and began helping remove
any belongings we could find from the wreckage. This was a long, slow,
tedious process, and throughout the day I smoked about 5 more cigarettes.
The whole day I was just in “Emergency Response” mode. By the time I stopped
in the evening, I was really mad at myself, and depressed that I had gone 24
hours without smoking, only to smoke again. Then again, it’s not like I had
an ABC ready for this situation!! I lay in bed examining what had gone
wrong, and what I needed to do.
Saturday, I started over. One of the things I decided to do was to stop the
Zyban. Taking it was just making me feel weird, and it was difficult to
pinpoint exactly what it was I was feeling. I decided that it would be
better for me to quit without any aids, get through the period where the
nicotine was still in my system, and deal with the behavior aspect of it
more rationally than before. The neighbors whose house had burned down came
over, and we spent part of the day looking for a place to stay, and the
other part sorting through some of their belongings. I used ABC’s to get
through urges, and had a pretty positive day.
Yesterday was much tougher, with my emotions going kind of crazy, but again,
I was able to come up with a more appropriate responses to my situations
than smoking.
Today is Monday, and I am back at work, and I have been having a pretty good
day. I am surprised that I have been able to go for more than 5 minutes
without thinking about smoking. I have been busy, which helps, but I am
trying very hard to keep aware of how I am feeling, and plan ahead to when
the next “have a smoke” response will be the one Warren offers me. So far, I
have been amazingly accurate with predicting when, where, and why. I just
need to plan for the “unplanned”.
I currently am committed to asking questions and seeking answers from this
site. It has been very helpful, and I am positive I can do this with the
tools I have been using. I’ll let you know any questions as they come up.
Thanks,
Amy