Giving Up Smoking

After 40 years with few breaks from the evil weed I am now giving up smoking because I need to not because I want to. You think that when you start smoking at an early age that you are infallible, nothing can touch you – how wrong can you be?

The worst scenarios are lung cancer or emphysema. No I haven’t got them or I hope not, but smoking for so many years has caused damage to my health and I need to stop harming myself before it’s too late.

Up The Hill – Or Over It!

When I walk uphill I get breathless and have to slow down. As I walk uphill almost every day to work in a shop I see the effects regularly. People who live on the route and are regular customers comment on how slow I’m walking. I reckon that there is no point rushing to work when really I can’t – or if I did I would be so out of breath I wouldn’t be fit to work for a while.

Night Frights

I get a smokers cough quite regularly but something frightening has been happening to me for several years. To start with I would wake up in the night and wonder what had woken me up. I would vaguely remember a whistling noise and wonder if somebody had broken into my house and not for the first time.

After a while I realised that it was me making the noises, or rather my chest. These noises occur whenever I lay on my back awake or asleep and I figure that it is my lungs struggling to breathe. That doesn’t happen when I stop smoking.

A Mouth Full Of Bones

About 10 years ago I worked with a lady who had just paid thousands of pounds to have bones from dead people put in her mouth because of smoking. The thought made me shudder then as it does now.

What I didn’t know until then was how much damage you can cause to your teeth and gums by smoking. You just think that your teeth go yellow, not that you are damaging the bone around your teeth.

I used to be nicknamed smiler when I was younger because I smiled a lot. Now I try to avoid flashing my teeth because they look horrible. Not yellow,  no this is worse. My gums have receded making my teeth look longer and gappy, that is because of bone loss and teeth loosening, which happens when you smoke.

Cold Hands That Hurt

During the last few years I have developed a problem with my fingers hurting when it’s cold or whenever I touch cold surfaces. This problem has progressed to the point that my fingers go white and then blue when the blood vessels close up.  At times it is excruciatingly painful and my fingertips become so sensitive that anything I touch hurts, including my keyboard and especially anything cold. At first I thought it was a circulation problem which you can get when you smoke.

This last winter has been the worst yet and the condition that I have is called Reynards Disease.  Smoking may not have caused it, but it is associated with the condition. If I am not careful I could get ulcers or gangrene and lose my fingers, so apart from trying to avoid touching cold surfaces I need to stop smoking to help alleviate this condition before it’s too late.

I could probably go on but I think that those reasons to stop smoking are good enough don’t you?