I’m 52 years old and I’ve been smoking since I was 16. This winter has been a hard one for me and I have had lung infections 5x in about 5 months. I just kept puffing away even though I was sick. This is embarrassing that even though you can’t breath and your hacking out half your lung, I just kept smoking. Finally, I had to go have a cat scan of my lung. It happened that, that very day was my quit date and I am using Chantix. So the 26th of January I completely gave up the cigarettes. It feels like a real accomplishment to me. I have been quit now for just 10 days. I was told from the cat scan that i have emphysema

While this is depressing news, I’m hopeful that quitting smoking now will save my life. It is hard though, and even this morning I was craving that nicotine from a cigarette badly. So, what helps me is reading about other people that have quit and looking at pictures of badly damaged lungs from smoking. When I look at these lungs, and realize that this is what my lungs look like, it gives me the incentive to stay quit.