Chantix side effects

ADDED
February, 2009

This post is now a year and five months old, yet I still get more hits on this one than any other. I've gotten some very pointed comments about how evil Chantix is and how I'm an idiot for using it. Yet I have to say that after a year and five months, I'm still not smoking.

Chantix was the perfect drug. For me.

I'm sorry if it is not the perfect drug for you.

I understand if you think it's a dangerous drug. I agree to a point. Most drugs are dangerous in the wrong hands.

But I still love the stuff and am terribly grateful to it for making me able to quit smoking.

So stop writing to me about how awful Chantix is and how the government should ban it. I disagree vehemently. You can't change my mind. I promise I won't make you take it. But don't take it away from me and all the other smokers who could benefit from its good qualities.

Now, on with the original post...

While rhapsodizing about mountains and Zippo lighters, I totally forgot to mention the latest news in my own personal Chantix side effects.

The nausea came back for a visit on Wednesday. No idea why. I guess I hadn't eaten enough before taking the pill.

Eh, whatever. I got over it, and I still took the next pill that night.

Today I was surfing around the Internet and finally heard that at least one person may have died because of Chantix. At least his girlfriend thinks it was Chantix that did the trick.

This is sad. It's sad on so many levels. I'll have to gather my thoughts and decide how to address this issue some other day. For now, I have to write some stuff and earn my keep. And I still am not smoking, not even when I'm writing. Pretty cool, huh?

Smokies from the ex-smoker

I was scrapbooking while the TV was on tonight, and I heard the distinctive sound of a Zippo lighter. Click, zzzzzzzzzz, phphphph, cuh-click!

It was Marlee Matlin in "Children of a Lesser God." I looked up and watched her exhale a cloud of smoke. And I was, of course, mesmerized. Smoking is pretty, darn it. It's so photogenic. No wonder it's still going on in the world today.

Someday I should photograph my Zippo collection. I love Zippo lighters. I have good stories about all of them.

My mother met my father during World War II. (I was a late surprise for my parents -- I really am not as old as most WWII couples' children are.) Anyway, Mama met Daddy at Maison Blanche in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Daddy was a Naval aviator. Mama was a secretary to the head of the candy division at Maison Blanche, who happened to be Daddy's long-lost uncle.

It's almost a scene out of a movie: "Good looking sailor walks into office where typewriters clack and telephones ring as 'Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree' plays on tinny radio. Shy, bookish secretary looks up and is instantly smitten. Sailor asks for long-lost uncle. Uncle proposes a night on the town in the Big Easy. Gorgeous rival secretary is busy. Shy secretary gets to go out on double-date with boss, boss' wife, and handsome sailor, then spends the next two years chasing handsome sailor to the altar."

It didn't take Mama two years. She snagged Daddy with a Zippo lighter. Everyone smoked in World War II, and Daddy was no exception. The thing was, with the rations and the hoarding metal for munitions and planes and such, you couldn't get a Zippo lighter. Daddy was using paper matches to light his cigarettes. Mama noticed this, and when he shipped out, she went to the counter at Maison Blanche -- which was a huge department store back in the day -- and told the girls there to let her know if they got a shipment of Zippos. Sure enough, a few months later when they did get some Zippos, they called Mama in the candy office.

Mama used up ration coupons and some of her hard-earned salary. She bought a Zippo lighter, and she promptly packaged it up and sent it to Daddy with a lighthearted note, "I noticed you didn't have a lighter, so I thought I would send you one. Here you go! Hope to hear from you soon!"

Puh-leeeeeeeeeze, keep in mind -- the entire time all this was going on, Mama was about 18 years old, and she was the only gainfully employed person in her entire family. Her father got occasional work, but he was disabled. Her mother was a real, old-fashioned housewife. Her older sister Sybil had been abandoned by a deadbeat husband, and Sybil didn't work. Sybil had a baby named Rodney. Mama's younger siblings were Dolores, who kept cutting school, and the baby of the family was Buddy, who was precocious and managed to make trouble where none was to be found.

Mama was supporting seven people on her secretarial salary, and she still managed to snag a guy that the Navy kept sending back to college with nothing more than a lighter.

I'm telling you, Zippos are good. Even if cigarettes are not.

The photo above is the Smoky Mountains. I don't know who introduced tobacco to the world, but whoever it was caused a lot of trouble for me and all the other happy smokers. I still don't think of myself as a non-smoker, but maybe I will be someday. In the meantime, I'm keeping my Zippos and my Smoky Mountains. I hope everyone understands. Some things are just too nice to be forgotten simply because they're related to smoking.

One Month

This will be a short post due to lingering, overwhelming exhaustion.

I have not smoked a cigarette in a month.

To celebrate that, my little family and I went to Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains.

I have been there before. Having spent all the summers of my youth in a girls' camp in the southern Appalachians, I adore the mountains. I love them. I love them. I love them. I cannot emphasize enough how much I love the mountains. I am not a beach girl -- I hate the salt and the wind and the crashing surf with all those biting fish and stinging things. I love the mountains.

But this time, we decided to go to Abrams Falls. That's a five-mile hike, round-trip. And it's up hill and down hill, and the sign at the start of the trail even warns that it is a hike of "medium" difficulty, and it could be a 3 to 4 hour hike.

It took me about 5 hours. I was literally the last person to stumble out of the forest Monday night.

People that I left at the falls... passed me on the trail.

Seriously.

I was the LAST person to walk out of the woods Monday night.

But at least it wasn't pitch-black. And I didn't get attacked by a bear or anything.

I do love the woods -- I particularly love the mountains. The verdant, fertile, black, old, rotting earth under the mountain laurels smells so delicious to me. It's so rich and sublime. Even in our drought, in the darkest, shadiest spots on the trail, trickles of underground springs made things muddy and mossy for me. I adore that kind of earth. I would live there forever if I could.

But I only get to visit.

Since I survived the whole ordeal, I do get to point out that I made it five miles and didn't need anyone to carry me out of the forest. Even my sister Amy thinks that if I still smoked, I would not have made it -- and I think she's right. I might not be past the point of being susceptible to lung cancer, but I am a lot better than I was 28 days ago.

I can't believe I still haven't smoked.

On the other hand, I am awfully glad I've made it this far.

Thank you, Chantix! And thank you, Chantix bloggers!!!!!! You guys keep me going when I think I'd like to have a cigarette!!!!!!

Scatterbrained but happy

I am -- scattered.

I don't know if it's the Chantix. I don't know if it's quitting smoking. I don't know if it's that I'm 40 years old. All I know is that I am more than a bit scatterbrained since I started taking Chantix.

The image here is a flipped scan of some unmounted rubber stamps. Those of you who do not craft, stamp, papercraft, or scrapbook are wondering what the heck the purpose of this stuff is. It's ... more cost and space efficient than traditional wood-mounted rubber stamps.

I have stacks of these things in my house, the result of a 7-year- obsession with everything Club Scrap. Late last week, a Club Scrap member posted on the email loop that she was searching for the "Kit for a Cause" unmounteds. I told her I had them, and five days later, I finally sent her a scan of the rubberstamp sheet that you see in this blog post.

It took me five stinkin' days to send her a scan that took me five minutes to accomplish and re-size for email.

And then she wrote back to me and said, "Those are the 'Reach Out' kit UM's. I was looking for the 'Kit for a Cause' UM's, but thank you so much, anyway, and I'll keep looking."

Seriously?

The moment she said it, I knew she was right. I *do* have the Reach Out UM's. I *don't* have the "Kit for a Cause" UM's. Sure, both of 'em were for charity, and both of them were wonderful, warm sentiments and images -- but how on earth could I -- *I*, an obsessed and rabid Club Scrap fan -- how could *I* confuse the two?? And spend *days* being confused? And actually *scan* the wrong UM's and send a picture days late to the person who wanted to buy the retired and much adored UM's in question?

I think it's the Chantix.

The other side effect of Chantix that no one warned me about was -- I think I'm generally happier.

As in, not quite as clinically depressed as I've been for so much of my adult life.

I love therapists and I hate drugs, so I spend a lot of time denying my basic underlying depression. I'm a glass-half-full kind of person, but things always get out of hand when I'm not looking.

Since I've been taking Chantix, I've been cleaning the house. I let housecleaning slide most of the time. It's so easy to give up on it. I mean, if you clean something up, it just gets dirty again. What's the point of making the beds? Someone's just going to go sleep in it and get it all rumpled again in a few hours.

But for the last few weeks -- I've been doing the most amazing things. Mopping the kitchen floor every few days. Sweeping all the wood floors every day. Tidying up bird cages, moving boxes of bottles to better storage facilities, and heck, yesterday, I moved the couch and swept *under* it. This is not something I *do*. Unless I've lost one of my favorite pens.

And cooking -- I've been reborn. I know Maggie's talked about all her cooking efforts on her fabulous blog, but honestly, for the last year, I have been in the most severe and uncompromising rut about cooking. I cooked dinner for 20 years. I got good and tired of it. My entire family knows -- after months of training -- not to ask the worst question in the world, "What's for dinner?" I can go berserk over such a horrid question. Don't ask. If there's a dinner in front of you, that's what's for dinner. If there isn't, well, find something else. And do not risk the Wrath of Bay by asking me what I'm going to cook. I can't stand making that decision....

Except that for the last couple of weeks, deciding what's for dinner and then making it has been enormously satisfying. Roast beef, pork chops, or my beloved steamed broccoli with lemon zest and balsamic vinegar -- I'm perfectly happy with dinner these days. It doesn't feel like the insurmountable chore that it felt like three or four months ago.

Maybe it's the Chantix. Maybe it's just coincidence. I don't know.

Oh, that reminds me. I really don't smell or taste things better than I did before quitting. I keep wondering if that's going to improve. I do feel better, and my mouth tastes better when I wake up in the mornings -- but other than that, the only benefit from quitting that I can discern is... I'm saving money.

And that's cool. I'm OK with saving money.

It makes up for being stupid and cleaning house all the time.

Where did all my money go?

According to my Quit Meter, I've saved almost $240 by not smoking over the last 24 days.

Seriously?

OK -- wait, let me quantify that last word. Shonda Rhimes and the cast of "Grey's Anatomy" has made the question, "Seriously?" terribly popular. I just want to let you all know that I seriously said "seriously" long before that TV show debuted.

I think it's a writer chick kind of word, which is why it just had to make it to the front of the entertainment world.

Oh, my gosh, y'all -- no one on Grey's Anatomy smokes. Not even the baddies!

Back to tonight's post: I have saved almost $240 by not smoking. Of course, I've spent $260 on Chantix so far. But I still have $65 worth of Chantix pills left! So that's a savings of, what, $45? YEAH! I think I did the math really well that time. My sister the math genius will let me know if I messed that up. OK, so I've bought two months of Chantix, and I've not smoked for three weeks and three days, and I'm already past the breaking-even point.

Now, my husband and I are "envelope" people. We don't use envelopes any more, but we are the kind of people who put our finances in order by putting all our money into categories. Bill money, grocery money, and daily money. We've been using this method for more than ten years, and it works for us. (Actually, Wesley was using that method before I married him, but I kicked him off track for a few years. And then I almost defaulted on my student loan, and then we got back on track by the "envelope" method. Our credit union gal loves us for this -- we are her most organized customers.)

So. I have had the same allotment for "daily money" as I have had for a few years. (We do have occasional raises in daily money to allow for inflation, y'know. Daily money used to be $15 per day. I don't wanna say how long ago that was.)

Now that I'm not spending some of my daily money on cigarettes, we have more daily money. Somehow most of it gets spent. But sometimes I have a little left over, and I tuck a $5 bill away in the secret compartment of my wallet.

This happens specifically because prescriptions come out of the "bill money" category of our family finances. If I had rolled the daily money surplus over into the bill money category, then I would not have been able to scrimp pennies together every once in a while.

And even though I've only been without a cigarette for about 24 days, I've already taken the whole family out for dinner once. In a nice restaurant. Where they wait on you at your table. And the drinks arrive in glasses, not paper cups. I mean -- this place had cloth napkins. I am not making that up.

I like that. I could taste the food; I could smell the food; I didn't have to cook the food; and someone else washed the dishes. And the whole thing was paid for -- out of what I had saved from not buying two packs of Capri Menthol 120's every day.

I rock.

My sister Amy rocks, too. She has been quit for more than a whole month, now!!!! And she hasn't lapsed at all!!!!! She is a rock star, and I am in awe of her!!!!

Then again, I have always been in awe of Amy. She helped me with my math homework, y'know.

Sept. 11th

No matter which way you look at it, September 11th is a tough day in anyone's memory.

I will never forget where I was or what I was doing when I first found out what was going on.

As a homeschooler, I didn't turn on the TV when I woke up that morning. I made breakfast, I drank coffee, and I chilled out before starting to educate my children. Then around 9:30, I turned on the computer to check my email.

I was on AOL at the time. A very dear friend of mine -- Linda -- IM'ed me almost immediately.

"Isn't it awful?" she wrote.

"What?" I typed.

"Turn on your TV."

I didn't even get offline -- I went up to the front of the house and turned on the TV, and from that moment on, I was riveted.

I lived on my couch for three days. I didnt turn off the TV. I did talk to people on the phone. And at about 3:00 in the afternoon, I woke up my husband, and I made him wake up because I had heard that gas prices were being raised, and we needed to fill our tanks with gas and get extra, because of the price gouging, which I never saw, but I always heard about during that week....

A year or two later, we were at dinner with friends, talking about that week. Some of our friends were in another state on a golf vacation with a large group of golfers. Our friend said, "We were on the greens that morning. When we finished our round, we heard what had happened. And then we didn't feel much like golfing after that."

Instead of feeling total empathy with that party, I was struck by his disconnection. "Didn't feel like golfing"??? He's got to be kidding. I could barely function that week. I couldn't remember to cook dinner for my children. I couldn't get off the couch. I was absolutely slain by the events of 9/11. I bawled my eyes out every time I saw a recap. "Didn't feel like golfing"??? Is he insane?

Now -- MSNBC re-ran their entire original 9/11 coverage this morning. And I didn't join the broadcast until 10:00 or so. I saw the towers collapse. I saw the misinformation as it was read out loud by anchors as if it were news instead of gossip at that point.

I remember that day so horribly vividly.

And tempered with that recollection -- is the memory that I was smoking the entire time.

A month later, my sister and I went to NYC. I would like to say we were with the rescue and relief teams, but really, we were the tourists. We were among the first tourists to brave getting on planes and flying directly to New York City, and we were proud to do so. When I think of our memorable trip, parts of it are colored by the fact that it was less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center. The other parts are colored by -- we were two smokers among thousands of non-smokers.

Smoking

Let's face it; we can't get away from it. What joins us all here is the fact that we are all quitting smoking.

I spent days after 9/11, camping out on the couch and smoking.

Now I'm watching those same videos, remembering New York City in early October, 2001, -- and I'm not smoking now.

It's a whole new world.

Check with me in a couple of decades to see if this "new world" has improved any since 9/11.

No Glasses

My daughter and I were just talking about how she hasn't noticed that I'm not smoking.

How can she not notice???

I guess it's a bit like having a friend who wears glasses, and one day she shows up without them, and you spend the whole day looking at her curiously and wondering, "What's different? I know something is changed -- is it her hair? Her lipstick? Her heel height?" And you feel just awful that you can't figure it out, but you're terribly surprised when you find out after 8 hours that she's just gotten contacts.

No glasses. How can I not notice???

Oh, well, as I was saying to a friend of mine the other day, "If you don't tell you you're fabulous, who's going to tell you the stuff you need to hear?"

I spend -- well, maybe an inordinate amount of time telling me I'm fabulous because I'm not smoking. I walk around telling people, "I smell good. I quit smoking." Sure, they look at me like I'm not right in the head, but they did that when I smoked, anyway, so I'm kind of accustomed to it.

But aside from announcing my fabulosity to perfect strangers, I also tell myself how cool I am. I wash dishes, apply lotion to my detergent-abused hands, and then smell them so I can tell myself, "The way these hands smell now is the way they'll smell in half an hour." And sure enough, they DO! How cool is that?

My hair? Oh, my goodness gracious, sakes alive. My hair smells *so* delicious. I can't help but remember those commercials from the 70's, "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific!" Of course, the person telling me this is not the cute quarterback from 1970's high school heaven, but me. That's OK. I don't need a teenaged football player complicating my life. There are other Tennesseans who went that route recently and infamously, and that sort of thing tends to end in tragedy, and darn it, I am trying to AVOID tragedy, which is why I gave up my beloved Capri Menthol 120's, anyway.

OH! That reminds me. There was a huuuuuuuuuge piece on tonight's evening news about Neyland Stadium. For those of you who don't live in this glorious state of gentle, green, rolling Smoky Mountain foothills, that's the place where the University of Tennessee Volunteers play football every fall. I've been to exactly one home game. Eleven years ago. But it was still a very nice experience.

Anyway, Neyland Stadium is going non-smoking. (I think they have to -- I think Tennessee passed some sort of really stringent anti-smoking law that goes into effect soon.) Neyland Stadium has always been a mecca for smokers -- you could smoke in your seat for years and years, and then there were all kinds of designated smoking areas.

As of today, there were only designated smoking areas outside the arena.

As of next week, if you leave the stadium, you won't be allowed back in.

So if you're a smoker, you are going to have to sit through an entire football game without a cigarette at all.

Oh, my goodness, the WBIR crew interviewed a dozen people or more for this piece. Many smokers were completely blindsided by this decision and were quite distraught. They love their football, and they love their cigarettes, and how can they possibly give up one for the other?

One young, young couple of smokers were sanguine about the development. "There are more non-smokers than smokers," said the young man. "Majority rules."

This is a fellow who obviously never lived as a smoker before the advent of non-smoking areas in restaurants, office buildings, and football stadiums.

But one woman -- honestly, I felt as if I knew her -- one woman said, "I never thought the Tobacco State would go this far. Never!"

I know what she means.

On the other hand -- and honestly, this was what I was going to blog about if I had only blogged earlier today --

-- I find myself... becoming ... slightly ... *repulsed* by smoking.

Not real smoking -- If I run into a cloud of real smoke outside the grocery store, I don't fall apart or retch or attack some unsuspecting smoker and snarl, as so many nonsmokers did at me over the years, "Smoking's bad for you!"

No, I find myself emotionally involved whenever I see someone smoking in a movie or a TV show. I'm torn. I'm fascinated by the mechanics of it. Light the cigarette, hold the cigarette, inhale the smoke, wave the cigarette away, exhale the smoke. As an actor, I am fascinated by the choices they make, whether to just exhale all the smoke out and then speak the dialogue, or to exhale the smoke with each word, which, to me, is the mark of a serious smoker and a much more serious character as a direct result of such an action. It *has* to be a conscious decision, acting-wise. It cannot be that the actors said, "Yes, I'll smoke for this movie, but I won't inhale. I'll just hold the cigarette."

They *do* just hold the cigarettes on the AMC channel's original series "Mad Men." A very few of the actors are actually seen inhaling and exhaling smoke, but they're all standing around holding lit cigarettes.

I was therefore fascinated Friday night, when I saw the 1940 movie "Rebecca." Sir Lawrence Olivier's character Maxim seemed to be bothered by smoke. Repeatedly, characters would ask about smoking, or put out their cigarettes in his presence. This was just fascinating to watch. (Especially juxtaposed against the eventually outcome for Manderley, but I shan't spoil the ending of the movie for any of you who many not have seen it before.) I have no idea whether Olivier himself were a smoker or not, but the sheer volume of etiquette surrounding smoking -- almost 70 years ago --

Aw, now, see? I've gone off on too many tangents. I'll never untangle this snarled mess! Just suffice it to say that I wonder if -- after 22 years of smoking -- I'll ever be "quit" enough not to think about it.

Say, I just remembered. I quit biting my nails for my 23rd birthday. I obsessed about them for an entire year -- oh, my manicure kit was sublime! -- and then I was able to just stop. Both the biting and the obsessing. I hope, I hope that I'll be able to stop obsessing about the quitting smoking thing someday, too.