How I Fooled Myself into Quitting Smoking

By Amanda Stutt, The Tyee. Posted April 21, 2008.

"There's no talking during the treatment," she says as I close my eyes and lean back into the chair. I can feel the wand run over my forehead, my temples, around my ears. The lights are flashing as I squint my eyes shut.

"Light clears away demons," my friend Lawrence said when he made the pitch.

"Demons?"

"Yeah."

Smoking, for the past 15 years, has been my demon. It owned me. I hunched with my cigarettes in alleys in the freezing rain. I got kicked out of a nightclub for smoking in the bathroom. I almost started a fire at an airstrip because I tried to sneak a cigarette during a ground transfer in Seattle. I'll never forget the panicked look on the tarmac worker's face as he screamed at me to put it out. And when it started to hurt when I breathed deeply, I denied the connection. I admit it, I would have run over my grandmother for a cigarette.

I remember my first drag. I was nine years old and my mother left a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the coffee table. When she left the room to answer the phone I picked it up and put it in my mouth as my younger sister watched in awe. I felt grown-up important, like it looked in the commercials. By junior high I smoked a pack a day. My main concern when organizing my modest finances was having the money to support my habit. That feeling of euphoria that you feel when you inhale deeply and the chemicals course through your veins. Only a smoker knows it.

I open my eyes and watch the woman run her wand in circles again and again under my nose. She tells me, "I'm going to stimulate glands in your brain that will help you stop smoking." And now she is saying, "I'm stimulating your appetite suppression gland. I'll give you an extra hit. You're a thin girl. Don't let yourself go. Don't ever get fat." I suppress my laughter.

We are in an unkempt office on the east side of Vancouver, and this bizarre procedure is nothing like a regulated, proven medical treatment for addiction. But I'm desperate. When it's over the woman instructs me to drink as much water as possible and take vitamin C for cleansing. "I want the nicotine out of your system."

Lawrence drops me off at home and kisses my cheek. "Good luck," he says, "I'll check up on you tomorrow."

Demons be gone

Within an hour, the craving hits. The magic laser hasn't killed it. I've never had the cravings and not given in to them. "I don't smoke. I don't smoke. I don't smoke," I tell myself. I decide my patio needs a good scrub and set to it. By seven at night I am beginning to pace the floor and feel like crawling out of my own skin.

By midnight I am almost in tears I want a cigarette so bad. There's no possible way I can sleep so I put on a movie. There are people smoking in the movie so I have to turn it off. I sit on the couch in the dark and think that I haven't smoked in 14 hours, the longest I've gone without a cigarette probably since I was 15. I feel panicky. I think about the next day, which I will have to face without cigarettes. I am afraid.

The next day I feel like a freight train is running through my veins. I pace like a caged animal. I start to sweat and chug water like a camel. I can't think straight. I can't remember basic information and can't carry on a conversation. I am in complete meltdown. I remember being a teenager and watching a movie where someone was coming off heroin, and they lie in a pool of their own sweat, shaking and convulsing. That's how it feels inside my head.

A week later, the worst of it has subsided. Except for the depression. For weeks more, I want to throw myself off the Burrard Street Bridge. I figure out why Zyban is such a lucrative niche market. My sister comes to visit and I am so horrible to her that she checks into a hotel to get away from me. I go to her room and we lie on the floor, drinking a bottle of wine. "I'm sorry," I tell her. "You don't know what I'm going through."

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Amanda Stutt is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist.

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