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Friday, August 29, 2014

Determined to give up smoking

Like most smokers I've wanted to give up for quite some time. Since the late 1970s I've made innumerable attempts to give up. Usually I've lasted no more than a few hours, occasionally a few days.

I've tried nearly everything from cold turkey,  hypnosis, nicotine patches, nicotine gum, Zyban and Champix.

The longest I ever managed to give up was for about a week, about 11 years ago. That was with the aid of a medicine called Zyban. For reasons I don't know Zyban is now no longer recommended and Champix is the preferred alternative. I did try champix a few years back without great success, but this time I am pretty determined.

My memory was that with Champix you were supposed to give up about 2 weeks into the course and I've registered with Quit line with a smoking succession date of 13 August. I've had the prescription filled and discovered that I'm supposed to quit some time in the second week of taking Champix. I've now redefined my quit date in my head.

Champix starter tablets are about the size of a grain of uncooked long-grain rice and about as easy to swallow. A large glass of water and some food is required to get them down.


This entry is actually being written on October 10 2014, attempting to reconstruct in my mind how I felt in late August.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Smoking blogs redux

This entry is actually being written on October 11 2014. I've spent the last month giving up smoking.

As part of my therapy I've been blogging every night since the 3rd night on the Quit-line site.

Quit-line is censored and it's also not the worlds greatest site for anything that isn't totally focussed on the process of smoking cessation. As always with me nothing is ever totally focussed on one thing so I've decided I want to repatriate my writing to a site I control.

I'll be republishing (sometimes edited) versions of my Quit-line blogs on here. This raises an interesting question about dates.

For historicity I want the blog date to be the original publication date, but I don't want to just suddenly dump 45 posts into the history of this blog. So I've decided to initially post them in something approaching a compressed version of real-time (two or 3 a day) but with the original date on them until I'm up-to-date.

I'll start with a (reconstructed) day I started preparing to quit followed by the blogs.

At some future point I'll move this explanation to where it belongs towards the start of the chronology. I've moved it to the start.