QUIT SMOKING, DAY 1

I quit smoking today, hurrah! It has been approximately 23 hours since my last cigarette, I was asleep for 4 of those hours, so let's make it 19. Huzzah! Having been a reasonably hefty smoker by my measure (15-20/day, anything over 25 is just wrong, even as a smoker did I think this), and so thinking if each cigarette takes approx. 5 minutes to smoke, that's 100 minutes a day - almost two frickin' hours! Jeez. So actually, thinking about it, that's quite a chunk of my day freed up.

Going cold turkey was never going to be an option for me, I think failure would have come calling if I had tried, so I went along with Betti last week to an NHS run 'quit smoking' group - I say group, there's three of us - and got myself started. The lady running it was lovely, she gave me some scary sheets of paper to make me realise just how gross smoking is and went through all the different NRT there are. I chose patches and inhalator, which is the most common combination. Had my carbon monoxide reading taken - it was 22. When a boiler reaches 11 it has be to be removed as it's too dangerous. I was two condemned boilers!!! Ugh. Hopefully tomorrow it will be reduced!

So I popped my prescription to the GP to be written up - if they hadn't ballsed up I'd have quit Friday so had to postpone but it's done now and I can't wait to keep it up.

So far my withdrawal symptoms seem to be dry mouth (ewwww) and eating shitloads of crap food, but apart from that the patch is great and, even though I feel like a massive dick walking round with a little white plastic tampon hanging from my lips, the inhalator is doing the job. I spent today with a friend who smokes and when she had a cigarette I had my inhalator and I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything, except maybe cancer.....

On to day 2.