My Zadie will roll over in his grave: Jen and the Jetta

When I was 19, I had a Volkswagen. It was old, and I think I bought it for $500 or so. I loved the car. It was the first one I bought all on my very own without any help from anyone. I proudly drove it to my Dad’s house to show it off.

“You bought that?” my father asked, staring at it.

“Yeah, isn’t it great? It was really cheap, but it still runs like a dream.”

“You bought that car?” he said to me, his voice rising in alarm. “It’s a German car, Jennifer. And not just a German car. It’s Hitler’s car.”

Oy vey. Right. It’s a German car. And not just any German car.

It was that car.

For those who don’t know their history, VW was founded in 1933 by Ferdinand Porsche after being approached by Adolph Hitler to create a “people’s car”. Adolf Hitler himself laid the cornerstone of the first VW mass-production facility where as many as four out of five workers were slave laborers. Some Jews wouldn’t touch a Volkswagen, much less buy one and drive one, with a ten foot pole.

I stood in the Volkswagen dealership today looking at Diesel Jettas, and my father’s words echoed in my ears from 20 years ago. Out of all the cars that we’ve ever thought about getting, diesel Jettas are at the top of our list for being awesome, and being green without having to deal with a Prius.

Interestingly enough, it turns out the Volkswagen may not be completely that car. “The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz” by Paul Schilperoord alleges that the Jewish engineer, and not Hitler, truly came up with the concept that Volkswagen built its company on.

There are also many other companies still in business today that collaborated with, sold to, or profited from the Nazis, including Kodak, Hugo Boss, Bayer, Coca-Cola… if you stopped buying from all of them, you’d knock a lot of common products out.

It is interesting (and ironic) that a Jewish engineer may have originated the iconic Beetle but even so…

I probably still won’t be mentioning to my Dad that I bought another Volkswagen.

Smoke Free over a month. Kind of Amazed. Yay, vaping!

I passed my quit smoking month mark and, oddly enough, I didn’t even notice. I thought that I would feel some kind of euphoric celebration on that Friday night when that one month anniversary passed me by, but I didn’t. I just kept vaping as usual, and noticed on Saturday I had quit for over a month.

Me. Quit. For over a month.

Lots of places have these little calculators that tell you how long you have quit – it’s supposed to motivate you to stay quit. Here’s my “I don’t smoke anymore” banner.

I wondered, though, about looking back.

And honestly, it wasn’t something that I thought I would want to do. But I did… I wondered what the calculation would be if I ran it backwards.

Cancer.org will give you the calculations… if you really want to know.

I estimated 1 pack a day for 20 years, cutting myself some slack for hopefully not having been a chainsmoker as a teen but, truthfully, this is probably a much lower end estimate and it could easily be twice all the numbers I am about to name.

Wussing out, though, it came out to 7,305 packs of cigarettes, or 146,100 cigarettes. That means I spent 507.29 days of my life smoking. Just over one and one third years, I lived my life with a cigarette in my hand.

That’s kind of astounding. Not nearly as astounding as the $40,000+ this calculator estimates that I spent to do it, though.

Start Vaping, Make New Friends, and Other Coolness

This has been a pretty interesting experience. Some of the highlights since I stopped smoking and started vaping are:

Going to the doctor and having the doctor compliment the choice and be ecstatic that my husband and I switched. (The Nurse also mentioned that PV’s were given to residents in a nursing home he worked at because the lifelong smokers were too ill to go out, and too unhappy without them, and they worked “fantastically”.)
Finding an instant and welcome community – ex-smokers and new vapers are evangelical when this works for them, and they are some of the most patient and kind folks in explaining things to noob idiots that I have ever found. Yes, it’s fun – but it’s also a cause that binds people together.
Going on a trip with my co-workers and not have to constantly break momentum because Jen needed a cigarette break (and a bonus, knowing that my co-workers and boss were so supportive that I vaped through the marathon hours-long meeting and they not only tolerated it but encouraged and supported it because they knew I was trying to quit).
Hearing my husband’s report of taking the kid to the doctor and having the kid’s pediatrician comment that we didn’t small like smoke.
Being able to taste.
Being able to smell.
Being able to vape in bed and not having to worry about setting the house on fire.
Being able to stealth-vape in the middle of the grocery store.

Probably the thing that’s made me most happy/sad and been most bittersweet is having my kid open up to me about how much my smoking and my husband’s smoking had bothered him all these years. He’s made little comments here and there that if he went to sleep over at someone’s house, he could smell the scent of tobacco on his pillow. His reports of a teacher thinking he may smoke – because he smelled like he smoked. Bitter, knowing that happened and I was oblivious to it because I couldn’t smell it, was incapable of noticing.

Sweet because I was able to stop it. Guilty because I didn’t do it sooner.

From Smoking to Vaping – 2 Weeks Smoke Free

This has easily been the most effortless “quit” that I’ve had. Since I have now made it two weeks, I guess this is where I start getting evangelical and dispensing advice.

Disclaimer: I used to know nothing about vaping, and now I know a little something but only slightly more than nothing. I’m no expert. To find one, visit this forum or my vape shop.

I have upgraded my vape tools from the Volt, which I liked, to an eGo dual coil (see the picture and click it to visit the site). There are tons of differences between them and, honestly, I don’t know what they are other than one is smaller and holds less juice, and the other’s bigger and doubles as an awesome tablet stylus. I’m learning, but there’s a ridiculous amount to learn – voltages, mods, regulated, manual, automatic… I have no idea what most of it means.

I know bigger meant a bigger vape, and it tasted yummier, so I bought it.

Which brings me to my first in what will no doubt be a long series of evangelistic pieces of advice when trying to quit smoking by faking yourself out by vaping…

Don’t Buy Your Vape Stuff in a Mall or Convenience Store

I first found out about vaping from the Smoking Anywhere guys. Mall Kiosks with hipster dudes and e-cigs abounded a few years ago. The spiel sounded good, and I plunked down the $100. It was interesting, but not satisfying – weak, and the juices sucked. It failed, and miserably fast.

Lesson 1: Don’t cheap out.

Second attempt was the Volt, and I liked the Volt. It was an exceptionally well made PV (personal vaporizer) and I liked the e-juices we bought – but again, I didn’t know any better. My lack of knowledge screwed that attempted due to my ignorance about what e-juices could contain, what was available, and their differences.

Vegetable Glycerin (VG) is a thick, sweet liquid and produces fluffy, heavy-ish clouds of vapor and lends a sweeter taste to your vape.
Propylene Glycol (PG) is a much thinner tasteless liquid (and is the same stuff in fog machines). PG produces more of a “throat hit” than VG does.

PG also, by the way, dehydrates the hell out of you – you could kind of guess that if someone were to tell you that PG is also used in humidors to control humidity. Unfortunately, no one told me, and I had no idea.

Lesson 2: Your juice matters as much as your PV.

The second time with the Volt, thanks to my getting 100% PG juices, failed. I felt like the Sahara Desert after a particularly brutal heat wave, and smoking cigarettes was less dehydrating than that stuff.

The Third Time Cham

So, third time’s a charm and I finally hit that effortless smoking quit that smokers that want to quit would probably trade their left arm for. I think this was due to ensuring that I had:

The right personal vaporizer – a quality one I was comfortable with that worked, and worked well
The right e-juice – the right nicotine level in the right flavor in the right mix of PG/VG for me
The right circumstances – I spent my first four quit days with 3 co-workers who knew I was trying to quit and who were extremely supportive (and who I knew would have been comfortable giving me crap if I showed up to a meeting smelling of a cigarette)

By the time I got done with those four days, I had been away from cigarettes long enough that my sense of smell, sense of taste has started to come back a little bit, and I had been vaping enough to prefer the clean taste of vaping over the thick, choking inhale of cigarettes.

Normally, if I hit two weeks with no cigarettes I would be climbing up the walls and an anxiety ridden basket case which, let’s face it, isn’t fun for anyone. This time, I dealt with numerous stressful situations and have not dealt with any particular basket case effects.

To some extent, quitting this way has seemed too effortless, and too easy. I already have hit the point where I might want the idea of a cigarette (the urge), but if I try and give in to the urge I am repelled by an actual burning cigarette itself.

From Smoking to Vaping Part 3

I am part of the 70% that wants to quit – but only to a point.

I want to quit because I know that a 50/50 chance of lung cancer is really bad odds. I know that as I get older the effects of smoking will become more pronounced and difficult to deal with. I know that I am missing out on things I want to do because I can’t smoke there – hotels, an Amtrak trip. Staying at Disneyworld on the property.

I don’t want to quit because – well, I don’t want to quit. I’m an addict, and I enjoy it, and smoking blunts some senses so that to a great extent that what bothers you about my smoking (my smelling like an ashtray) doesn’t bother me in the slightest (I can’t smell it if you smoke, much less the smoke clinging to me).

So, the divergent forces – I should quit. But I don’t want to.

Enter Tobacco Harm Reduction.

E-Cigarettes

What are e-cigarettes? Katherine Heigl explains.

Katherine Heigl on Letterman Sharing an e-Cigarette

Granted, Katherine Heigl potentially isn’t the most authoritative person discussing the issue, so let’s try a doctor.

UCLA Santa Monica Hospital, Chief of Staff, Dr. David Baron

At this point, I need to mention I am not hocking SmokeStik – it just so happens that they have gotten pretty good press and have a great video that helps people understand what an e-cig is.

When I tried to switch last summer, I found a lot of blogs that were clearly slick affiliate splogs for different e-cig companies, but not an enormous number of personal stories, tips, and tricks for starting out – people tend to get passionate one they’re in it, but not so much when they are first starting out.

So, I decided I wanted to blog the journey, a bit.

Today is Day 4 since I have had an “analog” cigarette – the common name vapers use for a paper/tobacco leaf cigarette. And obviously “vaping” and “vapers” are the common name for using a personal vaporizer instead of an “analog” cigarette. Tomorrow, I’ll begin detailing out some of the issues surrounding switching – and there are issues.

It is still “quitting” some things, if not nicotine. There are things that you can do or choose that may make it not work for you – I had those and failed to switch last summer.

Hopefully, it helps someone better prepare, or encourages them to give it a shot.

From Smoking to Vaping Part 2

There are a lot of studies now that show a lot of smokers are smoking to self medicate – 75% of schizophrenics smoke, and this higher than average correlation is present in a lot of people with a variety different mental illnesses. My own youth was fairly difficult, and I don’t doubt that my experiences contributed to what was probably major depression. Smoking helped then.

As an adult, I once tested slightly higher for obsessive compulsive “tendencies” on a psychological test, and while it doesn’t lead me to wash my hands a couple of hundred times a day or cause me any major issues, it does lead me to have the ability to hyper-focus on a problem or complex issue long after most people would have burned out.

Some have suggested that smoking itself should be classified as an anxiety disorder, since all those of us who do it are likely compensating or self-medicating something.

OCD Tendencies? Have a drag and get to work.

My husband (who, ironically, has ADHD and who’s tendencies are almost the polar opposite of my own) says that watching me focus on an issue is almost frightening thing because he’s intimidated by my dogged determination to unthread a problem, figure things out, and organize everything into answers.

These tendencies have, to a great extent (and to such an extent that I wouldn’t consider medicating their eradication) have helped me through my life as opposed to being a hindrance – but when you hit a wall when finding a problem and you will accept nothing less than a solution, that’s stressful.

I have no doubt cigarettes helped relieve that stress.

Grit Your Teeth and Quit vs. Tobacco Harm Reduction

With the high potential rate of people “self-medicating”, the prevalent government tactic of “quit at all costs no matter how much it sucks to be you” is destined to fail for a lot of people.

Smoking statistics regarding quitting are absolutely abysmal.

I know numerous people, including myself and my husband, who have tried (and failed) repeatedly. Despite it being pounded into you that you have to quit or you will die a horrible death, people keep smoking. Despite 70% of people wanting to quit, most keep smoking.

It is an addiction and a habit that becomes to ingrained into your physiology and psychology that the “quit or die” lament works for a minority, and pisses off the majority.

Yet Tobacco Harm Reduction is a relatively new concept, and not one widely accepted yet.

In 2007, Britain’s Royal College of Physicians concluded “…that smokers smoke predominantly for nicotine, that nicotine itself is not especially hazardous, and that if nicotine could be provided in a form that is acceptable and effective as a cigarette substitute, millions of lives could be saved.

I would argue that “inveterate smokers” smoke for a lot of reasons, Nicotine only being one of them. It is a habit, it becomes ingrained in your own mental image of yourself. It’s boredom, enjoyment, a high, a calming thing under stress. It’s self-medication, it’s self-regulation. There is no one reason (nicotine) smokers smoke. If there was, as soon as the patches came out we would have all quit.

Ok, or at least 70% of us.

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This is Part 2 in a series of posts about going from smoking cigarettes to vaping nicotine and an examination of the thought processes, experiences, and outcomes of doing so.