How I Quit Smoking
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I remember when smoking was cool. All the fun, rebel kids did it. I began in my early teens. I think what really started me smoking was the thrill of sneaking my mother’s menthol cigarettes, so that I could take a few drags, cough violently, and feel queasy. A few years later, I became a hardcore, pack-a-day smoker.

Smoking was becoming uncool by then. Health Canada kept going on about health risks. I became defensive when people told me I should quit. ‘What are you nuts? Smoking keeps me sane. It relaxes me.’

But something happened between me and my cigarettes. Perhaps it was that hack. Every morning I woke with it. And any kind of physical exertion, including hearty laughter, triggered it. There was the smell on my skin, like that of a bathroom in a smoky bar. Unsavoury, unclean. There was the cost. ‘What? How much money? That’s craziness.’

Then there was my addiction. I would do incredibly stupid things to get tobacco, such as wander the streets in the bad part of town to get a pack of smokes from the Mike’s Mart at three in the morning. I should have been sleeping, but I was out of cigarettes.

The short leash tobacco kept me on led to a level of frustration that finally made me yell, ‘Get off my back you nicotine-stained, chain-smoking monkey!’ I went cold turkey. Which is kind of hard. And even though that monkey kept banging on my door, I never let it back in. That was back in my twenties, over fifteen years ago.

Since then, I’ve learned some interesting things about smoking. I mean, we’ve all got the basics. Smoking is bad. Smoking increases your risk for acquiring diseases that can kill you. We’ve all read the warning labels on the cigarette packages. I’m only going to focus on one startling point here, something called direct endothelial damage and promotion of endothelial dysfunction.

Here’s how it works. Your arteries are designed to allow blood substances to slide through your system. Smoking is like taking heavy grit sandpaper and roughing up the lining. Over time, particles in the blood stick to this roughened surface, and you end up with a thick stiff plaque made of cholesterol, lipids, calcium, and fibrous tissue. This plaque decreases the amount of blood that can get through your arteries. Less blood equals less oxygen to the brain and body. So you may feel woozy and you’ll get quite tuckered with physical activity or get chest pain.

Now to take the problem to the extreme, think about what happens when mud gets stuck in the barrel of a gun. The trigger is pulled and the bullet fires (think blood ejecting from the heart) but it can’t get out of the barrel because of the mud block. Boom. The barrel explodes. With the artery, maybe some of the plaque dislodges to cause a block (thrombosis), or maybe the artery completely closes due to the plaque. In either case, the organ on the receiving end of that artery, such as your heart, receives no oxygen. Maybe the organ dies.

Here’s the interesting part. In the past, the scientific world found that when this tough atherosclerotic plaque built up, it didn’t go away. Once you had it, it was there for good. Really. That’s why surgeons have to perform bypasses, to patch in a better blood vessel, or angioplasties, to open up your arteries by mashing and breaking up the plaque with a balloon-like instrument, and sometimes permanently inserting a slender metal-mesh tube, called a stent, to help hold your artery wide open.

Scientists are a dogged and persistent lot, though. Promising studies have been leading the way to a potential method of atherosclerotic reversal. Emerging from these studies is a new type of program offered by some hospitals to people who don’t have the option of an operation. An example of this program is the Atherosclerosis Reversal Clinic, which is part of the Healthy Heart Program at St. Paul’s Hospital & the University of British Columbia.

There is no magic pill here. The goals of St. Paul’s program are to improve your cholesterol levels, have you quit smoking, go on a low fat diet, lose weight if need be, exercise regularly, control your high blood pressure, manage stress, and for diabetics, to gain optimal control of blood sugars. How are these goals reached? Hard work by you, with two solid years of behavioural readjustment training, that’s how. And even if you go the distance, you may be one of those people who don’t experience any change.

This type of program is very new. It might be the way of the future, but only hard data gathered over years will prove it a viable treatment. Only time will tell.

I worry sometimes about the plaque I carry around with me. It seems very stupid to me that I have increased my chances of dying early because I smoked way back when. But those are the facts. Even though I don’t know how well the reversal program will work for me, I follow it daily by default, because active living and good nutrition are how I live my life now.

All I can think is maybe you don’t have to scratch up your blood vessel linings in the first place, eh? You don’t have to allow that thick plaque to harden up your arteries. Go on. Have a yell at that tobacco monkey leaping onto your back. Then Kung fu him.

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Photo Credit: Martin Walls & Vivek Chugh

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