It’s Not About Me! by Ian Young

Author:Ian Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908746863
Publisher: Anoma Press

2. Abstinence? Seems a bit extreme!

Let me give you a quick example, which summarizes the type of poor decisions I’d been making for many years previously. When I smoked a cigarette, I would consume it in 3 or 4 minutes. I wouldn’t smoke it slowly, but I’d take long drags on it and hold the smoke down in my lungs as deeply as possible for as long as possible. I was effectively getting high on the oxygen depletion as much as any nicotine buzz I could create. Around the age of twenty-eight, I began coughing in the mornings. I began coughing up phlegm and constantly using my asthma pump. I was always short on breath, unless, I was smoking Crack, in which case I miraculously managed to restore my lungs to full capacity for the duration of the session (often lasting 3 or 4 even 5 days). I don’t know how, but I was always able to smoke Crack. But I knew the cigarettes were causing me to struggle with my breathing and were the source of my cough, which was just getting worse and worse, and being noticed by just about everyone. The obvious solution to most people would be what? Stop smoking altogether, right? Pack it in. If eating bread and jam were causing me to come up in a rash, I would stop eating bread and jam, even if I really liked raspberry jam flavour, right? I would stop doing the very thing that was causing me such harm and distress to my body.

However, I wasn’t ready to stop. I was nowhere near ready to stop. That conversation was still a very long way off. Stopping smoking? Out of the question. I am a smoker, by definition. That wasn’t an option I was prepared to consider. I began making plans to accommodate this cough by constantly carrying my inhaler around with me (which was later to become my Crack pipe), and buying lozenges to suck upon. After a while though, my cough just got worse and my breathlessness was becoming a serious hindrance to even sleeping and to just walk. It seemed like I needed to be smoking Crack just to be able to breathe properly. Even at this point I didn’t even consider not smoking cigs, even though I knew smoking was the reason. I negotiated with myself and moved to a lighter brand. I would check the tar levels versus the nicotine levels and I sought out brands with a higher nicotine level but lower tar level. And so, smoking what was a lighter cigarette, I went about my business. But here’s what happened, yes my cough did subside for periods and it became less unmanageable, though it never really subsided totally, and I then began smoking more cigarettes than ever before. I went from being a 15/17 a day person, to going up to 30 a day - almost double. Yes, I addressed the problem in sorts, but no, I would not actually do what I really needed to do.

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