Smoke Signals

by A.J. Daulerio

For 20 years I was a pack-a-day smoker, and I’d tried to quit in every conceivable way—cold turkey, patches, Wellbutrin, hypnotism—but nothing ever stuck for more than a month. In 2017, in my 40s, still smoking heavily, and now staring down a due date for the birth of my first child, I read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking as a last resort. Somehow, through a bit of mind-control sorcery I still don’t understand, it worked. I planned never to touch a single nicotine product ever again, because I’m so paranoid that the spell might break and I will end up a 50-year-old pack-a-day smoker unable to take the stairs nor do anything active with my THREE children. 

After my annual physical this year my primary care physician, a 60-ish man with an earring, informed me that despite my good behavior, my spirometry results revealed I had the lungs of an 83-year-old man.

“Eighty-three!” I was aghast. I felt betrayed, having assumed that my seven-year abstinence would, at the very least, have given me age-appropriate lungs.