Screw you for not smoking

January

I got the stomach flu, and not the standard 72-hour belly-turner. This was all intestinal pain, shimmering fevers and muscle aches that ran from the crown of my head into my knees. The symptoms lasted for a couple of days, then eased up for a couple of days, then came back. The cycle lasted two weeks. I ignored the pleas of friends and family that I see a doctor, since by now I was scared of what he might tell me about my suddenly unreliable body. I'd tried to take control of my own well-being by giving up smoking, but instead had been buffeted by all this bleeding, tripping, barfing, sore, beat-up bad luck. What if he saw iller winds on my horizon?

And so I sat my flu out. There was a string of sharp, bright days. I looked up at the cold sun as I walked to work, silently begging it to make the dark circles fade from under my eyes, to give my face some elasticity again, to smooth my twisted sleep into much-needed rest.

February

I got pinkeye: bright red weeping eye, mild stinging. At least that's what I was told as I was prescribed drops to make it better. It was later decided that what I had was a lacerated eyeball, though that could have happened while I was futzing with the pinkeye. Whatever it was, it healed up in about six days. As a result of being unable to wear contacts, I developed a series of migraines.

The weekend of the pinkeye, I got depressed. I am not prone to the blues. But it was late February. I was 10 pounds heavier, pale, cold, tired, with a weeping eye, headaches and a scalp that was now flaking copiously after weekly preventive doses of tea tree oil shampoo. I cried for a whole weekend. I missed smoking.

It's not that I regretted quitting, or believed that the coincidental string of maladies I had suffered were legitimately tied to the departure of Camel Lights from my nights. But without cigarettes, I felt like a different person. I was a different person. That's probably what I was going for when I began smoking in high school, though in truth I barely remember what first tempted me. Whatever led me to tobacco, it had become a part of who I was as an adult. I had assumed that when I banished the habit, I would get back a version of my younger self: a refurbished body and freshened face, pockets full of cigarette money I'd never spent. Instead, I felt diminished, dried up without the illusory substance that apparently had been keeping me outwardly robust while it was rotting my insides. I felt like the silly girl who'd partaken and then been deprived of forbidden fruit in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"; I was growing thin and gray, dwindling as my fire burnt away. Except for the thin part.

Depressed but not incapacitated by it, I increased my yoga sessions to five times a week, to help fight off whatever assailant might be poised to strike next, and because of the mood-enhancing benefits of exercise. This plan actually worked; I felt my body strengthen, and I was cheered, in a giddy way, by learning to stand on my head, my hands, my shoulders, and sometimes my forearms, for the first time in my life.

March

Occam's razor would suggest that these gymnastic feats probably contributed to the pinched nerve that woke me from slumber the first weekend of March, though I told my mother, who faintly disapproves of the yoga, that I got it from picking up a heavy case of cat food. It runs painfully from my neck down my arm, and may be caused by a couple of compressed vertebrae in my neck. It kills.

I realize that this screed chronicles a set of minor ailments that add up to nothing serious. I am lucky in my good health and strong body, even when it is compromised by inconvenient contusions, parasites and pain. I am much luckier than I might be if my 13 years of smoking ever come back to haunt me, which is a possibility. And I am lucky in having been able to so far stay away from cigarettes. There are many whose addictions have left them unable to make the break.

I would also be remiss in failing to acknowledge the physical benefits I have noticed. Since I quit, I no longer get hangovers. My clothes smell better; I assume that I smell better too. I suspect my lungs really are cleaner; after attending a recent party at which people were smoking, I felt a pulmonary ache that lasted till morning. And I was surprised, during a February swim, that after months of forgoing cardio, I could manage 20 minutes of laps without stopping to catch my breath. But in truth, the realest benefit of five months without smoking is the feeling of virtue, or, less smugly, the relief at having rid myself of a problem that had loomed for too long.

I understand the incentive value of a myth of perfect pink health around the quitting corner; but in its own way, it's as dishonest as the tobacco lobby's now-retired claims that cigarettes weren't hurting anybody. Maybe some quitters pop from their nicotine carapaces all shiny and smooth, but I have learned that it's also possible to emerge haggard and green around the gills, with a body ravaged by years of cigarette smoke and exhausted by its sudden absence.

I don't mean to suggest that smokers shouldn't quit; on the contrary, my post-nicotine odyssey of malaise and maladroitness has confirmed that it was long past time for me to put down the smokes, as much as I loved them -- and I really, really did love them. Had I been able to rebound to marathon form with the alacrity of a celebrity mom bouncing from delivery room into Catwoman suit, I'd probably just have lit up again and put the process off another couple of years. As it is, all I can say is that I hope to never have to relive these months, and more fervently than that, as delicious as the nectar was, I wish I'd never tasted the fruit of goblin men.

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