Chronicles of an Ex-Smoker, Part 2: Losing My Mind

I can't stand these nicotine lozenges. They don't help me much cope with everyday stress. But what can I do? If I go off them, I won't have the willpower just yet to cope with nicotine loss in my system. I'll crash back to the cigarettes.

Plus something else has happened...overall, I feel like utter shit.

Complete and utter shit. I go to bed just fine but wake up feeling like I've been through a train wreck. Body aching in all kinds of places, that sort of thing. In fact, I'm hurting right now. I guess I have some belief that -- if this is just stress -- that writing it down will help make me feel better. Typically, by about 10-11 a.m. (mere hours from quitting time) I feel better.

It doesn't help that someone tried to break into our apartment last weekend while we were away from it.

I don't know if the cigarette quitting has anything to do with how I feel, I just know that I've been far more absent-minded than usual, a lot slower in terms of mental performance overall, and definitely physically slower.

For those that don't know, I became a walrus in the year following my original back injury last year. Doctor's orders not to move for months on end, but it's a long story. But someone my height shouldn't weigh 330 pounds, that's the point. I'd been trying, prior to quitting smoking, a rigorous (rigorous for me) exercise program on my stationary bike, 15 minutes a day, 3 times per week. Since I quit smoking, I've been too exhausted to even force myself up on that bike.

I've noticed notable improvements, but are they improvements considering that I'm quitting smoking? Here are my current cigarette stats, courtesy of a prog I put on my desktop:

Stuart - Free and Healing for Seven Days, 13 Hours and 15 Minutes, while extending my life expectancy 22 Hours, by avoiding the use of 264 nicotine delivery devices that would have cost me $50.77.

All that accomplished in one week. But, I wonder if I shouldn't have tackled my weight first. Cigarette smoking 9 times out of 10 causes weight gain after cessation. My weight is critical right now, I can't afford to gain another pound, much less the typical 10 or 20 that are supposed to come with cigarette loss. And although I feel I'm handling this entire situation admirably overall, I unfortunately do eat a lot, and am eating a little more since I quit to keep myself from crashing. That's why I wonder if I shouldn't have tackled my weight first.

This is a double-ended sword as well. My weight isn't helping my back injury, not one damned bit. I suffered permanent nerve conduction loss in my legs, and they're already working triple-time just to propel my big ass everywhere. Plus the L5/S1 disc that I ruptured and herniated, it's at a place inside my body that just can't handle my monster gut hanging from it.

There's a little jealousy on my end, too, as my wife has lost 17 pounds in the last month. She has Weight Watchers at work, and a healthy support group in there with her. She's encouraged me to join it, but I'm honestly skeptical as hell that I'd do any good on it without the support like she has at work with the weekly meetings. Focusing too hard on a diet right now might drive my cigarette withdrawal to levels of insanity to a point where I crash, too, so I have to keep that in mind. But I am a bit envious of her...she's looking very nice...and I'm looking very Abrams A-1-like.

And all the while, the normal household items that get done by me (dishes, vacuuming, living room, kitchen, laundry) are falling by the wayside and my wife is having to pick up the slack because I'm so damned exhausted.

Maybe this has nothing to do with my quitting smoking. Maybe the stress from quitting smoking is exacerbating my already-existing problems. I distinctly remember telling a friend how effing tired I've been prior to quitting smoking. Yes, I told my doctor too, now that I think about it. That was before I quit.

I wasn't like this before I agreed to move back to an early morning shift. Shit...

...I just don't get it. Maybe all this will iron itself out in a week or so. That's another thing -- still worried about work. Very worried. If I don't get hired permanently in January, my wife and I are going to be fucked, money wise, in spite of our admirable saving in the previous months. I'm being given reassurances that are encouraging, but at the same time, I see things that are discouraging too. I really enjoy the nature of the work I do. But I'm also up against several pretty decent guys, any one of whom are as deserving of a permanent position within this company as I am, imo.

All I know is the longer I go without a cigarette, the harder it actually gets to not pick one up. There's never a 'good' or 'ideal' time to quit. I could have used that excuse NOT to quit if I wanted to, but I didn't.

Maybe the moral to my story is simply this. I have problems and they aren't going away easily nor quickly.