A Depiction of Addictions

I don’t think there’s a person on the planet who hasn’t, at one time or another, suffered some form of addiction. Certainly there are the obvious ones, like alcohol and drugs. To a lesser degree, in many minds anyway, you also have nicotine and caffeine.

Some people are addicted to horrible things like cutting themselves. Some are addicted to pornography. Still others to less harmful things like food, video games, exercise (which wouldn’t come close to being an issue with me!). Even house cleaning, also not something that’s ever likely to be a problem for me. If you look hard enough you can almost always find beauty in things. Unusual things. Dust.

The list is probably a long one. And I know I’ve dealt with several of them myself.

For instance, after the birth of my first child, those prescription diet pills seemed like a perfect solution for the post-pregnancy pounds. Not to mention the serious lack of sleep that all mothers experience!

The first day I made the mistake of taking one as soon as I left the drug store. It was, oh, around four in the afternoon.

Not one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made. In fact, twenty-four hours later you might have said it was one of the ‘stoopidist‘ ones I‘d ever made. But not without its rewards.
You’d think that there was only so much cleaning that you could do in a four room apartment. Not so! If you do it repeatedly, from shortly after you finish your miniscule dinner until five the next morning, that sucker is gonna shine!

The energy benefits aside, did they help me lose the weight? Yup. But I made a nasty little discovery about three months later. When most of the weight was gone and the doctor decided I no longer needed them. Something that same doctor, bless his li'l pea brain, neglected to mention.

They happened to be extremely addictive!

I’ll tell you what. It made for a pretty miserable couple of weeks, when I was getting over the worst of it. But even several months later, I still craved them. It’s not a problem for me today, but there was a time I’d have done just about anything to get them. And did. I’m ashamed to admit that I actually changed doctors in order to get more.

But I guess the second time coming off was enough misery to last a lifetime because I never did it again.

Then there was the caffeine. God sure knew what He was doing when He created that stuff. I’m not as bad about it as my mother-you could feed her coffee intravenously and she wouldn’t get enough-but it was definitely one of my favorite things. (just a side note here. Decaf might taste just as good but your body knows it’s a fraud!)

Turns out, though, that being pregnant wasn’t the breeze for me that it is for many women. Nope. After the first one, the rest were high risk. It took seven tries to get the three kids I have. And during one of the unsuccessful pregnancies, it was strongly suggested I give up caffeine.

No problem.

Enormous problem.

While it didn’t seem possible, giving up coffee and cola was even harder than giving up the diet pills. Maybe my subconscious remembered the misery from the other two times and was saying, No! No way! Not again!

But stubbornness prevailed and, after two or three weeks of horrible headaches and some serious irritability, I was fine. And smart enough, finally, to not pick the addiction up a second time. Surely, somewhere down the line, another doctor was going to tell me to quit-and I wasn’t willing to risk going through those withdrawals again!

That left one addiction for me to deal with. Cigarettes. The worst of them all. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to quit smoking.

I need to insert a quick warning here... Do not call it a habit. Them’s fightin’ words! :o)

I have a habit of washing my hands fifty times a day. I have a habit of saying, “It occurred to me...” (something my mother points out on a regular basis) I have a habit of going barefoot.

I was addicted to cigarettes. Or more precisely, the nicotine in the cigarettes. But I did love smoking.

So much so that I’d light one before heading to the bathroom first thing in the morning. That I would choose to smoke rather than eat-and often smoked while I ate. That I would avoid places and situations where smoking wasn’t allowed. I even smoked when I’d get bronchitis and pneumonia.

But I finally licked it on October 31, 2006.

It took a lot of stubbornness, a lot of praying-on my part and by people who cared. And a lot of nicotine gum. Having never been much of a gum chewer, I’m a little disturbed to still be chewing it, nearly two years later.

People try to tell me that the gum is a lot better for me than the cigarettes were. And they‘re 100% correct.

I love not coughing and clearing my throat all the time. I like being able to walk and not get out of breath. I enjoy going to the theater, restaurants and events where smoking isn’t allowed.

But I hate that I still have this one last addiction in my life.

My pocketbook isn’t too thrilled with it either. Because even though, right from the first, I bought the highest milligram gum and broke each piece into thirds, it’s almost as expensive as the cigarettes themselves were. Especially since I started out with seven a day (twenty-eight thirds), and have increased to eleven pieces every day (thirty-three thirds).

Nicotine gum is one addiction I fear I’ll never be able to break. Although I’ve heard some good information about Chantix. Even though I don’t like taking prescription medication, I may break down and give it a try. One of my brothers quit eight months ago using it. But it didn’t work for the other one. That’s a fifty-fifty chance for success right there, based on sibling results.

It’s also a fifty-fifty chance to fail. And Chantix, too, is pretty darned expensive!

I’m curious to know if anyone else has tried it. And if so, what happened? Can Chantix be used to break a nicotine gum or patch addiction? Has anyone even tried? Successfully?

Please feel free to let me know. Or if you’ve found another way to get this particular addiction out of your life.