Editor's note: Mary Ann Owen is program director of nuclear medicine technology in the School of Allied Health Sciences.
On Jan. 4, 2007, I celebrated one year without cigarettes. I was a Virginia Slims gal. I’ve come a long way, baby.
I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s watching sexy movie stars smoking cigarettes on black and white TV. I wanted to be sexy, and maybe a movie star. Cigarettes came with the package. I smoked my first cigarette at age 14, stolen from my mother’s carton of Parliaments. It made me sick, but it certainly wasn’t my last.
By 17, I was a cool pack-a-day smoker. My friends and I would sneak out of the house late at night, steal away to the woods and smoke. Illegal drugs weren’t on the radar screen for nice girls from Atlanta, but smoking seemed like a grown-up, liberating thing to do.
My habit came out of the closet when I went off to college. Everyone smoked. Connections with cancer and heart disease were just emerging, but that didn’t affect us, the young and immortal. Smoking was part of the culture. The advertising allure permeated all media: Smoke cigarettes to earn prizes. The light ones won’t harm you. The menthol cools like a mountain breeze.
My parents—both smokers—also reinforced the message. They were college graduates—Dad a Harvard alum. Such worldly people certainly wouldn’t make an unintelligent choice.
And I loved to smoke. The price—25 cents a pack—equaled a gallon of gasoline and barely put a dent in my discretionary income. I never dreamed that by 2000, it would require a second mortgage to maintain a two-pack-a-day habit.
My first second thought came in 1983 when my mother, age 57 (my age in 2006) had a carotid artery procedure to remove a 95 percent occlusion. Her physician told her if she didn’t quit smoking, she’d have a stroke. She threw away the Parliaments. I kept my Virginia Slims. I loved to smoke. I was still young, no need to quit.
During the ’80s and ’90s, I raised two children. Both preached to me about the dangers of smoking during their grade-school years. But to a smoker, cigarettes are more important than considerations of secondhand smoke, so I continued the addiction. Sad how parents’ habits haunt their progeny. My son smoked by age 20, though he quit eight years later. My daughter had always been disgusted by the habit and never considered it—until the day she asked me if I minded if she smoked a cigarette with a cocktail. Thankfully, good sense prevailed when she realized a smoking habit would interfere with her dream of singing professionally.
I entered health care as a second career in middle age. I loved my new life. I loved my patients and found I received as much from them as I rendered as a caregiver. They had found real truths through crises of body and soul, and their words became tenets to live by. I once had a patient with Stage IV lung cancer ask me if I smoked. When I said yes, he told me to put them down and never pick them up again. Certainly this was a wakeup call.
Certainly not. I loved to smoke. In 1995, a lung cancer patient in his 70s asked me if his lung scan showed that he’d quit smoking in 1972. Second thoughts for me? Not yet. I loved to smoke.
So I continued, with sporadic attempts to quit. One attempt lasted a year, another two years. But smokers live in a sea of rationales that support the habit. One—the illusion that social smoking is a possibility—drove me back to two packs a day. I also devised excuses to eliminate cessation tools: the patch gave me cardiac arrhythmias; walking (an alternative to puffing) was seasonal; nicotine gum worked fine, as long as I could supplement the gum with cigarettes.
Finally, after years of smoking, my blood pressure and cholesterol were out of control. In 2000, I changed primary care physicians and happened upon the very practitioner who had decried R.J. Reynolds’ Joe Camel campaign. He was caring and adamant, but not pushy. We made a deal that I’d quit. I didn’t. My blood pressure continued to rise, my job got more stressful and I smoked more.
Immortality was beginning to wane. But of course, no one is immortal—not a 57-year-old, not a 27-year-old. I was becoming short of breath. I was constantly fatigued from insomnia. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, but I kept smoking.
I can’t point to the day or incident in 2005 that I’d had enough. Smoking had caught up with me, and I was too old make deals with doctors or God. It was up to me to face facts and get my life under control. It would have to start with a plan to stop smoking.
This time, there would be no gimmicks, no patches, no obsessive focus on the event. Here was the plan: I’d set a time to quit, then I’d quit. In the meantime, I’d give myself permission to smoke as much as I wanted wherever I wanted without thought for the impending due date. So around the first of October, I decided to quit in January. The first week in January 2006, I worked on my last carton of Virginia Slims, and on Jan. 4, I sat on my front porch at 8:30 a.m. and savored my last cigarette.
I haven’t looked back. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d anticipated. I told no one of my plan to quit, and I told no one that I had quit until two months after the act. Don’t ask, don’t tell. The less said, the less focus on the plan C9 the less thought about cigarettes or smoking or my other life.
Yes, I think about smoking, and every now and then, I’m aware that this would be a good time for a cigarette break. But those thoughts are fleeting. I don’t smoke.
As MCG embarks on its plan to be smoke-free, I am pleased that I have already achieved the goal. It’s important to think that in a world where external forces can control our actions, we can exercise our will to control our choices. I’m proud of what I have done to create my own smoke-free environment. I’m not a movie star, and I’m certainly not sexy, but I’ve come a long way, baby.
| Today welcomes submissions to the Reflections column of the magazine. Typed essays (approx. 750 words) reflecting a professional or personal experience should be submitted to: Christine Hurley Deriso, Editor, Medical College of Georgia, FI-1040, Augusta, GA 30912, (706) 721-2124 (phone), (706) 721-6397 (fax), . |