Joining the 7% Club

In November of 1995, 8 months and one day after I moved to the US, I received the worst news up until that point in my life. My grandma, 62 years of age, had died of lung cancer.

It struck me as very odd that a woman of her years who smoked 6 cigarettes a day or less and was in extremely good shape could succumb to such a disease. But she did.

Five years before this, I was standing on a bridge that crosses a busy highway in my home town of Arnold in Nottingham, England. My sister, a few of her friends, and I were doing what we British tweens did back then -- nothing. My sister and her friends had taken up smoking cigarettes. I'd never tried it, but that cold night would change all of that. Michelle offered me a Benson and Hedges cigarette. Those, along with "Embassy No. 1" were the "cool" cigarettes to smoke. I nervously took the smoke and lit it up after a few failed attempts. No one told me you had to suck while lighting it. I breathed in the fumes of my first cigarette and instantly my throat and lungs went in to shock. I doubled over the edge of the bridge, coughing like a fiend, and promptly vomited.

By the time I turned 13, I was up to 10 cigarettes a day. My mother funded my habit. Not intentionally at first, of course. I'd cut back on buying lunch and would buy a pack of 10 Embassy No. 1 at the corner shop before catching the bus to school. We'd run up to the top deck of the bus where you could still smoke. That's verboten now. The typical routine was a smoke on the bus on the way to school, a smoke during the morning break if some nosey teacher wasn't watching us, two or three at lunch and one on the bus on the way home. During my three years of school that I smoked on school property, I think I was caught exactly twice. Not that I cared.

When I moved to the US at the age of 17, I was a 20-cigarette-a-day smoker. My parents had to buy my smokes then since the legal age is 18. And before I was legal, as I heard that my grandmother's windpipe had ruptured from coughing constantly and she had bled to death on her bathroom floor, I vowed I would quit.

Seven attempts later, here I am. Two days shy of one year smoke free and feeling pretty damned good about it. Seven percent is the number of people who quit and stay quit for a year. It definitely wasn't easy, that's for sure. I had three or four months of absolute hell. If it wasn't for my boyfriend and family keeping me honest, I would have slipped more than once. On Thursday, I'll crack open a bottle of champagne and drink to my recovering lungs, my health, and my grandma, without whom I probably would have let smoking be the death of me.