Merlin's Musings

On Tuesday, I celebrated yet another milestone. It has now been 2 years since I quit smoking.

I've not yet been a former smoker as long as I was a non-smoker. I still have 18 years to pass that milestone, but I have confidence now that I will make it. I hear that there will still be urges, that you can never let your guard down, and I'm sure that's true. However, I honestly can't tell you the last time I had a cigarette. The smell of it puts me off, and makes me wonder how I abided it for so long.

There is one thing I do know. Not one cigarette, ever again. I know that if I smoke even one cigarette, I will go right back to smoking again.

If you've never smoked in your life, good for you. Don't start.

If you're a smoker, please, quit. Now. Today. Stub it out, throw out your pack, and go buy the gum, or the patches, or see your doctor for a prescription. Yes, it's a tough row to hoe, but it is absolutely worth it. I think of all the time I missed with my kids because I just had to step outside for a quick one. You can tell yourself that it calms you down, or settles your nerves, or whatever other little lie you want to in order to justify the habit but trust me, it is a lie. The first 6 months were a close approximation to hell, but it has been so much better these past 18.

If you're a former smoker, congratulations. I'm proud to be in that club with you, and look forward to sharing membership for a long, long time.

Um, what in the world was I thinking when I decided to quit drinking the weekend of the college football championship games?

I must say, old habits die hard. Very, very hard indeed.

. . .I'm done with it for now.

I have slowly come to the realization that, for now at least, beer and alcohol are not my friends. Part of my weight issues are related to those empty calories. I've also probably been overindulging of late.

So, it's time to try an experiment. I'm going to put the beer down (mostly) for the rest of the year. I might allow myself one if we go out to eat, but no more than one.

I want to see what happens. I'm pretty sure my weight will continue to move in the proper direction. I think my energy levels will return to where they were months ago (I've been exceptionally tired of late, but have had trouble sleeping). I'm hoping my overall mood and attitude improve as well.

I'd say let's drink to it, but, um, yeah.

It's a gaming console, with a fairly simplistic interface. The characters are all cartoonish. It's obviously targeted at kids by and large.

Given all of that, why in the world am I so sore today?!?!?

As part of my on again/off again attempts to drop weight and get healthy, I've started working out on our Wii again. Several years ago, we got the Wii Fit game along with the balance board. For the last two days, I've spent at least 30 minutes each evening doing step aerobics, shadow boxing, hula hoop, and other activities.

This morning? My biceps are sore, my deltoids and shoulders are sore, and my hips are sore.

Everything I did was non-contact. I didn't even do any of the so-called strength exercises. All I did was aerobics and balance games. I guess I'm being a little too exuberant with the shadow boxing or something.

But, ya know what? I'll take a little soreness in my muscles. According to the scale, I've already dropped 4 pounds in two days. I'm sure a lot of that is just fluctuation in water retention, but the scale is moving in the right direction again.

Now all I have to do is keep up my motivation, and keep working out even when I don't feel like it.

I really don't get this mindset. First, the back-story.

On the bus this morning, I noticed a guy I see semi-regularly was using a crutch. I asked him what happened, little knowing the rant I was in for. It seems that 6 weeks or so ago, he was trying to push a car up an incline, it rolled back on him, and the fender clipped his leg, fracturing his fibula. Being a "manly man", he didn't do anything about it other than tape it up or something. He apparently doesn't like going to the doctor unless he's dying, because all they do is try to cheat him out of his money.

Well, fast forward a few weeks. His leg is swollen from the ankle to up above the knee, and he has pain in his groin area. "Hmmmm, that's not good", he said. And he still didn't go to the doctor. A few more weeks go by, and the swelling is worse. He finally goes in to the doctor, who sends him straight-away to the emergency room. They perform an imaging test on his leg (he said MRI, but I think it was more likely an ultrasound), and diagnose him with multiple DVTs. Naturally, due to the risk of the blot clots detaching and causing a pulmonary embolism, they immediately admit him to the hospital and put him on a blood thinner regimen.

He is, naturally, still on warfarin, and will be for at least 3 months.

Now to his complaints. First, he's complaining that he had to be admitted to the hospital. As he put it, "I still have the blood clots, the blood thinner doesn't dissolve the clots. So why did they have to admit me, but now it's okay for me to be out and about?" Second, he's complaining about the cost. He apparently has a catastrophic health plan, so his out of pocket expenses were pretty high. Third, he's complaining about a "conspiracy". You see, he apparently doesn't understand fluid dynamics, and doesn't understand how a blood thinner reduces the risk of one of the clots detaching. He's apparently asked multiple doctors and nurses, and is not satisfied with their answers. Again, he goes back to the whole "if I still have the clots, why did you have to admit me in the first place?" and "why are they giving me rat poison?"

Here's where the conspiracy part comes in. In a round of industry consolidation, all of the area hospitals and doctors' groups have been bought up by the same entity. For a 5 county area at least, if you go to a hospital or see a doctor, they will be a member of this network. Since he disagrees with the original doctor, and all of the subsequent doctors have given him the exact same information, it must be a conspiracy where they are covering for each other and protecting each others backsides. Oh, and they admitted him just so they could bill his insurance plan, instead of it being the best therapeutic option for him at that time. He's talking about seeing a doctor in a neighboring state for a third opinion, since that doctor won't be part of the same medical group.

That set off a whole round of complaining and ranting amongst several of the other riders. I finally had to put in my earphones and crank up the music.

That whole mindset just drives me insane. He waits for over a month to have a fracture and concomitant swelling looked at by a doctor. He's allowed a highly dangerous medical condition to develop, and now he's complaining about the treatment regimen. In less than 5 minutes using my smart phone, I was able to confirm that the treatment protocol he's on is the standard one. But for him, there's some sort of conspiracy in place to separate him from his money.

Are some of the medical costs too high? Absolutely. Do doctors oversubscribe tests? Quite often. The thing is, as I understand it, these items are actually related. Doctors are naturally scared to death of malpractice lawsuits. So, they carry insurance, which is quite expensive, which increases their overhead costs. Then, they test things to the nth degree just to make sure they haven't missed something, instead of going with the most likely diagnosis.

When I was younger, I enjoyed running.¹ I played soccer, rugby, swam, and ran cross country in high school. I had fairly decent cardio endurance. When I got to college, I was in the Corps of Cadets. We had thrice-weekly PT sessions, and running was always a component of that.

At my best, I could run a 5k in under 17 minutes (averaged about 5:30/mile).

This morning, I ran/walked 2k in 18 minutes.

So why do I have a hankering to get back into running? And to actually do a 5K (a fun run, not necessarily for competition)?

I do remember a sort of catharsis from running. There was this feeling of just being able to decouple, to put the body into motion and to allow the mind to just spin and churn and process. I can't say I ever had huge epiphanies, but I have resolved things, brought things into focus, or otherwise just uncluttered my mental space for a bit.

It may be time to get a new pair of togs.

¹Yes, yes, I was running to evade the local dinosaur population. Har-de-har-har.

One year, four months, three weeks, and one day. 10186 cigarettes not smoked, saving $2,037.35. Life saved: 5 weeks, 8 hours, 50 minutes, according to SilkQuit

About a year ago, I posted that I was betraying my new home state.

According to a quit meter that I am using, it has been one year, two days, 8 hours, 22 minutes and 7 seconds since I smoked my last cigarette.  Based on an average of 1 pack (20 cigarettes) a day, I have not smoked 7346 cigarettes in that time, saving $1,469.39 (based on a price of $4 a pack).  Also, according to its calculations, I have saved 3 weeks, 4 days, 12 hours, 10 minutes of my life.

Six months ago, on June 5th, I quit smoking.  As I said in my original post, it's hard.  It must be the hardest thing I've ever tried to do.  This is not the longest that I've succeeded in quitting.  I made it 7 months on a previous attempt.  But I've learned some of the pitfalls, and I now know some of the signs.

So far, I've been able to avoid some of the temptations that brought me low before.  It's still hard, very, very, very hard.  There are days when a whiff of cigarette smoke makes me cough and almost physically sick.  There are other days when it seems a breath of fresh air, and I'll try and follow the smoke trail until I realize what I'm doing.

But, I have succeeded so far in that I have not bought a nicotine product, and I have not lit, chewed, dipped or otherwise consumed any since I finished my transdermal patches.

I must say I'm a bit disappointed in that things have not been going as well as I'd hoped they would on the gym front.  I haven't ballooned up like the Michelin Man, but I haven't lost the weight that I wanted to either.  I guess maintaining the status quo has to count as something of a win there.

According to Encyclopedia.com:

Tobacco, in which Kentucky is second only to North Carolina among U.S. producers, has long been the state's chief crop, and it is also its chief farm product[...]

 I started smoking in college, somewhere around 1994 or 1995.  That makes it 15 or 16 years now that I've polluted my body, all the while lying to myself about its effects, or otherwise justifying my habit.

I've tried 4 or 5 times to quit, and man let me tell you, it's hard.  It's probably one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do.  The last time, I made it all the way through the 10-week cycle of transdermal patches, and eventually lasted 7 months until I wimped out again.  The reasons don't really matter.  The way I see it, I failed, and I've probably thought less of myself because of it.

It's an oft-quoted truism that if you get bucked off the horse, the best thing you can do is get right back on.  I didn't, at least not immediately.

I have now rectified that oversight.

I smoked my last cigarette the evening of Friday, 06/04/2010 and slapped on a transdermal patch.  I'm considering Saturday, 06/05/2010 as my official quit date.  It also seems that I unknowingly selected quite the auspicious day to begin a new chapter in my life (Happy Birthday Breda!!!).

I've also joined a gym (through an office discount), I'm working with a personal trainer once a week, and I've set some fitness goals for the next year.  The money I'll save not smoking is paying for the gym and trainer, and that will then pay for itself many times over in the long run.

The King is dead.  Long live the King!!!