That's basically all you can say to your doctor when he tells you you should quit smoking. Especially if he's treating you for an upper respiratory infection.
How did it come to this?
When I started smoking at the age of fifteen in 1994, I never imagined that at the age of thirty-one I'd be living with my husband across the street from where I bought my first pack of cigarettes, have a Masters degree that was the culmination of many late-night nicotine fueled projects and papers, and that I'd be hacking my lungs out at a doctor's office with the doctor asking, "Do you have any desire to quit?" I told him I've tried to quit a bunch of times. It's true; I have tried at least 20 times to quit in my sixteen years as a smoker. One time I managed to be smoke-free for 5 months... and I really thought that time was the time. I mean, I got through feeling nauseous around second-hand smoke and people who smell like smoke, I was over it and I really thought I was a non-smoker but then one night I couldn't get to sleep and I had gotten an incomplete in one of my classes during my second-to-last semester in grad school, so I was doing work to make that up; the last semester and finishing both my visual and written theses loomed just ahead, and I was really stressed out, so I went out and got a pack of cigarettes at a 24 Hour Deli. Poof! Months of hard work down the drain, back to zero. That deli isn't 24 Hour anymore. I wish it hadn't been when I went to buy those cigarettes!
If I had known all that when I was fifteen, I would've put my box of Marlboro Lights 100s (I still remember!) down on the sidewalk and run away from it, screaming, in the opposite direction.
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