#1 - I’m in a fair amount of pain after 50 crunches and 4 sun salutes, so exercise has to be on the list.
#2 - Call my sister more often. She’s in Italy. Skype, here I come!
#3 - Sleep more. This 6 hours-a-night business is bull.
Any more than 3 and I’ll never do any of them. I’m stopping before this becomes an impossible to-do list. Wish me luck!
‘tis the season for new year’s resolutions and this year, I’m joining the crowd. Or rather, I’m taking over! Tracy and I met at a dinner party at Melissa’s a few years ago. So, New Year’s Eve I called to wish her a Happy New Year blah, blah, blah, you know how it goes and told her about my resolution. She laughed at my past failures, but then offered to help me this year! Her advice was to blog about it. “It was kind of like a nice, swift, kick in the butt to cross the finish line. People are watching, you won’t want to let them down.”
Uh oh… I might be in trouble! For the last few weeks, my “long slow” run on Sundays has been 8-9 miles. I’ve definitely been fudging it way more toward the 8 miles (heh), except for two weeks ago when I actually hit 9 (unbelievable!). That was the longest distance I’d ever run in my life, but it was also pretty exhausting! Continue reading
So it’s already March and you’re realizing you didn’t keep up with your New Year’s resolution for even two weeks. Maybe your diet plan was undercut by too much stress and too little time, or your resolution to exercise daily was compromised when you pulled a muscle (which still hasn’t healed) by trying to do an hour on the StairMaster on January 1st. Your desire to organize faded away when you realized you couldn’t even find the things you’d wanted to organize. You’re at a bit of a loss, to say the least! Continue reading
Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. These are the World Marathon Majors, and my commitment to San Francisco means I won’t be a part of them this year. No big deal, though–I’ll save Boston for my second marathon (assuming there is one!). Continue reading
All I can say about this group of guys who ran across the Sahara desert is wow. WOW. I mean, four thousand miles — in some of the worst weather conditions you can imagine! It makes a regular ol’ marathon in a regular ol’ US City look like nothing! Continue reading
I previously wrote about thinking a higher power may be at work, helping me to remain commited to my resolution and I promised to share a story I came across at about.com. This is the story of Christine Rowley, a Guide for many years at about.com’s Smoking Cessation Pages. She has been good enough to share her experience with emphysema and why we don’t want to deal with it in our lives. Although her story is sprinkled with humor, there is nothing funny about her story. If you are sitting on the fence about your decision to quit, I hope this will help you take the first step.
When someone in the family trips over your trailing 50 foot air hose in the family room, you know it, even though you are in the computer room, the kitchen, the bedroom, or the bathroom. If you have a lot of slack, you might not feel it. If there’s little or no slack, you feel a sharp yank on your ears, like someone trying to pull them both off at once! Your other scare is that someone has not only tripped, but may have lost their balance and may have fallen!
NEW LIFESTYLE
What’s it like to live with oxygen in a nose hose 24/7 for the first year? From what I’ve learned and have been told by others with COPD, that was the beginning of what could be years of living this way.
Your life takes on a whole new direction when you are told you have emphysema. At this point you find that you have quit smoking too late. It has been creeping up on you for years. You’ve been coughing your “smoker’s cough” around the clock without giving it a second thought, or kept your head in the sand and tried to ignore that chronic bronchitis which led to the emphysema.
BRAIN FOG AND EXHAUSTION
Although I’d been told I had emphysema (COPD) four years previously, I was shocked when my doctor only just now prescribed around-the-clock oxygen for me. That happened because I’d tried to rake some leaves in my back yard. I couldn’t believe how quickly I ran out of steam and could not catch my breath! Plus, I was in what I called a “brain fog” a lot more these days, so my doctor discovered my body’s oxygen level was operating on only 74%, where normally 90% + is acceptable. So, it was oxygen tank time for me.
MY NEW LEASH ON LIFE
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be “on a leash”, you’ll wonder no longer as your try to adapt to your new lack of freedom. Wherever you go, there it is. You’ll learn to dress without the “nose hose” on after you’ve found out what happens when you get dressed and find the hose now runs down the inside of your pants, making it difficult to navigate. For us women, you haven’t lived until you’ve trapped the hose on the inside of your bra and not noticed until you tried to leave the room.
Some “leashes” take a curious delight in becoming entrapped when you close the door on your two door style refrigerator, thereby forcing you to open the door once again to duck to get the looping hose out. Mine does this 97% of the time whenever I open the fridge door. Trust me, this is NOT a good way to stay on a diet!
NOSE HOSES AND EAR LIFTS
Opening a hot oven becomes an exercise in juggling hot racks, hot food, and keeping your cool oxygen hose off the hot surface! This can be done by tucking the hose between your knees. When you get up from the table, or from any sitting position, be sure you are NOT standing on your hose. Your ears will feel like they’re going into outer space if you don’t get off it quickly! If your ears are close to your head “before nose hose”, you may notice them beginning to flare outward if you step on the hose too much. A bold new style of makeover!
SNAGS
You will soon learn to hold your nose hose with one hand while gallivanting through the house. If you don’t, you will experience many backward head jerks due to the hose getting caught around corners, in the corner of appliances (yes, the refrigerator comes to mind again), and under door jambs. The rocking chair is superb at reaching out and snagging it often, and woe is you if one hand has a plate with a sandwich on it, and the other hand has a glass of milk! You have no way of getting free of the snag unless you put something down and yank it out from under the rocker. Passing mates are really handy right about then too.
TANGLES
The tubing (which looks like aquarium air line) can become kinked and tangled after a day of going back and forth and can actually become kinked to the point of nearly shutting off your air. Where you were at 2 liters before, you are now down to below one. Now you’ll need to find the kink and un-kink it. As you do, you’ll see the level on your concentrator return to 2. You’ll need to check your concentrator as you go by to be sure you are getting the air you need. The concentrator machine is a bit noisy, so you might want to keep it away from your living room and sleeping areas.
When sleeping, you never know if you are going to wake up with your nose hose still in your nose, or if it’s to be found atop your head where you pushed it in the night while asleep, or it may be lost on the floor.
Aghast, you wonder if you got enough oxygen during the night. You must also remember to take your medicine, including any inhaler prescriptions nightly.
THE PET THING
If you have dogs or other pets at home, they will react to it in different ways. One of mine hates the hose and avoids it like the plague. It’s taken him a year to even accept it. The other seems to think it links us together like Siamese twins, and she sits or lays on it every chance she gets. She’s responsible for some of my ear tugs, let me tell you! Cats, as you know, love to chase moving “strings”. Keep her nails trimmed.
OXYGEN LEVELS
Power failures are worse for you than your computer dying from power failure. If the power goes off, you need to plug into your bottle oxygen, which only lasts a short time, so it’s a good idea to have at least 4 filled bottles around continuously. Vacations are planned around your oxygen provider’s nationwide or worldwide reach and availability of oxygen wherever you go and when you need it. Trips into town or to the grocery store have to be planned by how much oxygen is in the tank you are taking with you. If it’s not enough, you will have to change the tank, removing the regulator and putting it on a full tank before going shopping.
STARING MATCHES
Once outside either with your large tank with the wheels, or with the portable unit, you cannot elude the stares of both children and adults. The worst are the smokers whose minds you can just about read by the way they look at you in horror. “I wonder if that could possibly happen to me? Nahhhh! I’m not old enough yet!” they think. Well, I used to think the very same way! When you have an oxygen tank, you no longer have an “invisible” disease. It is all too visible to the whole world. And it becomes scary. Almost all emphysema is cause by smoking, did you know that?
PREVENTABLE, BUT NON-REVERSIBLE
Emphysema is not a reversible disease because of the manner in which the lung is damaged. You lose more and more elasticity within the lungs as time goes on, and it becomes harder to breathe. You can avoid getting emphysema by quitting smoking just as soon as possible. “Now” would be best. The other option is to never start smoking. Believe me, smoking is not worth going through this in any way, and I wish I had never started smoking as a teen. Guess I should have listened to my Dad, right?
GRATITUDE
The good thing about having this oxygen 24/7 is that my gratitude has grown because my life has been extended for a time by having oxygen to help my body operate as well as it can. Without it, who knows how short the time would be. I hope that my life will be extended long enough for a miracle to happen; medical or otherwise. Truly, I pray a smoking-related disease NEVER ever happens to you.
Sadly, Christine has passed away. I hope her story will inspire you to quit before it is too late. It has inspired me to stick with my plan. Thank you for sharing, Christine, and may you rest with the angels.
Well, here I am three weeks into my resolution to quit smoking! I wish I could say that it has been easy, but I would be lying to you. It’s still very hard for me, but I have smoked for probably 45 years and I can almost liken this to losing a friend. Cigarettes have been my companion for all that time, helping me through stressful situations, even making me feel socially more secure! So, I didn’t really expect it would be easy.
I find that I have to keep reinforcing and reinforcing my commitment to stay strong. I had a routine doctor’s visit yesterday and shared the news with my doctor. Boy, did she make me feel good! She was high-fiving me and told me how proud she was of me, it was great motivation to continue. I almost feel like I have an obligation now not to let the people in my life be disappointed! Hey, I will take motivation wherever I can find it. 
I’ve rediscovered an old love of mine - jigsaw puzzles! I kind of get obsessed with them so it really helps me not to miss a cigarette so much. Once I start them, I have a hard time pulling myself away from them, so it keeps my hands occupied doing something I really enjoy and I don’t feel the need to run outside for a cigarette because I can’t pull myself away from the puzzle, ha ha! They are even available to do online, although I don’t get quite the same satisfaction as I do in handling the pieces to see if they fit. Some people find that knitting or crocheting serves the same purpose - I am not that domesticated. Whatever floats your boat!
I don’t know how many of you out there who are reading this are spiritual, but I do feel like there is something greater than me at work in this. It seems like whenever I feel like I don’t want to do this anymore, something comes along to steel my determination again. As I mentioned before, my granddaughter was a big inspiration for me to do this. She and I have been passing the same cough/cold between us for about 3 months now. First, she was diagnosed with ashtma - then when the nebulizer didn’t seem to be of particular help, she developed pneumonia. So, we are both on antibiotics now, trying to get rid of this for good this time. Thank God she is on the mend now, but it certainly powered me on to stick with my goal.
Then, I came across one woman’s experience with emphysema. I really want to share that story with anyone out there who is still trying to make up their minds about quitting. I will post it in a separate post when I have more time to type it all up…there is a jigsaw puzzle with my name on it!
If you are planning to stop smoking, this article may give you something to think about.
According to The British Medical Journal, University College London researchers performed a survey in which it was found that two-thirds of smokers who stopped suddenly succeeded for at least six months, compared to under half of those who planned it in detail. The study suggested that planners possibly felt less strongly about giving up.
The theory is based upon the idea that, prior to giving up, smokers have varying degrees of motivational tension, which results in the decision to quit.
Motivation is likely to be high in those who take immediate action, but less so in those who opt to quit some time in the future.
In the study, 65% of the unplanned quit attempts had succeeded for at least six months. This compared with 45% of those who planned to quit in advance.
It has traditionally been thought that the best way to quit is for smokers to go through several stages - thinking about stopping, planning the attempt and making the attempt.
Researchers say this is not to imply that planning to quit is counterproductive.
Lead researcher Robert West said: “The results do not mean that we should tell everyone to stop without planning ahead, but they do tell us something about the state of mind of the smoker who wants to quit.”
“Dissatisfaction with being a smoker creates a kind of tension. Then, when that tension is high, even quite a small trigger makes the smoker decide that the time has come to stop. “
“If that decision is to quit some time in the future, rather than right away, then in some smokers it could indicate a weaker commitment.”
Jean King, director of tobacco control for Cancer Research UK, said: “This is an interesting survey showing that there are different strokes for different folks.”
“The new findings suggest that some people can stop on the spur of the moment and that is very good news for them.”
“Others benefit from planning a quit date.”
“In both cases people can always get additional support from Stop Smoking clinics which have helped thousands of people give up by providing nicotine replacement therapy, support counselling and a timetabled plan for smokers if that is what they need.”
So, if you want to stop smoking and you don’t have a plan, don’t be afraid to just jump right in if the spirit moves you. You may be more successful than some others! From everything I had read on the subject, I felt that I was not being serious about it if I didn’t have a plan. So, I made one! It’s been a tough two weeks for me and I don’t know if it would have been any better to have quit when I first decided to do it. I probably would have been over most of the withdrawal symptoms by now though! 
This is definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do. At nine days in, I am still struggling with withdrawal. It’s hard to understand why marijuana, cocaine and other such drugs are illegal, while the demon tobacco is still a legal, highly profitable business here in the U.S.
And smokers are not the only victims. Last week my granddaughter was diagnosed with what her pediatrician believes is asthma. I am so thankful that I did not smoke in the house, nor when she was around. Her Mom also quit and she is almost 3 weeks into it and doing great. My granddaughter was not exposed to smoke in her house either. But, I know if I had been smoking around her, I would feel like I wanted to slash my wrists now. Okay, maybe not that bad, but you know what I am saying. I would certainly be kicking myself over and over again.
But, my point is, if we know that the kids of smokers are being exposed to something so harmful, why is it legal? Add to that the statistics for illness in smokers, which is part of why health care costs are so high, I just don’t think that adding a dollar more per pack is enough to get people to quit. I know that a black market would probably be created as a result of illegalizing cigarettes, but I think it would go a long, long way in getting people to quit.
Do we have the right to force people to quit though? Would offering a tobacco-free alternative be an answer? Something that was not harmful to us or others and not addictive? It’s a hard call.
Anyway, back to my struggle. I’ve already had two arguments with my husband in the past nine days!! I am definitely irritable. Serves him right for saying I wasn’t going to quit, LOL!