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Smoking: 3 kick the habit, and 1 is still trying

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By Bridgette Outten, Staff Writer Updated 12:36 PM Monday, March 29, 2010

These days, Eldon Miller sometimes can’t even find a lighter to light a candle.

The time where he would have had one readily available to light a cigarette has passed.

Miller stopped smoking on Nov. 30, after he and three other Clark County residents participated in a six-week smoking cessation program sponsored by Community Mercy Health Partners and partially funded by the Ohio Department of Health, Office of Healthy Ohio Tobacco Use Prevention and Cessation.

He’s still smoke-free.

“I’m breathing all right,” said Miller, 67. “Got a hacking cough but it must be one of the medications I’m on.”

He has several other health problems, including a hip that needs replacing. But at least those issues are no longer compounded by his smoking.

He remembers picking up his first cigarette as a boy, about 12 years old.

“Back then everybody smoked,” Miller said. “My mother, my dad, aunt and uncle. Back then, it was a cool thing to do.”

Since he’s stopped, it’s getting easier, but he hasn’t stopped thinking about smoking.

“Sometimes it’ll just hit me and I think, boy, a cigarette sure would taste good. But it passes,” Miller said wistfully.

He said his resolve to be around for his grandchildren is still strong and his quitting has inspired his grandson.

But Miller has a daughter who still smokes and “every now and again, I’ll get a whiff of my daughter’s,” he said. “But I light an incense candle and burn it, to cover up the smell a bit.”

Once he locates that lighter.

Here are progress reports on his fellow Clark County quitters:

Dawn Cromlish: Still gaining ... weight

Dawn Cromlish still hasn’t taken a puff of a cigarette after quitting Nov. 30.

“It’s going well,” she said.

And she’s still gaining weight; in some ways, she’s replaced smoking with eating.

“Food tastes better,” she said.

But Cromlish, 43, is OK with that.

She went from 97 to 120 pounds and has discovered something in her smokeless journey: Cigarette smoke stinks.

“I can smell it” on a smoker now, where before she was oblivious, Cromlish said.

She can recall the first time she picked up a cigarette at 12 or 13.

“It was nasty,” Cromlish said.

She didn’t touch them again until she was 18, when she gave in to the stress of having a newborn and to what was socially acceptable, even encouraged, at the time.

“My mom smoked, my stepdad smoked, people coming over were smoking,” she said. “It was just automatic.”

Now it’s easier to resist, partly because “there are so many places you can’t smoke,” Cromlish pointed out.

Instead of giving in to stress, she tries to keep busy and has become very adept at “piddling around the house,” she said.

“I don’t even think about not smoking,” she said. “I just don’t smoke.”

Denise Harris: Still holding steady

Denise Harris, 51, has been fighting a battle with strep throat for the past week or so.

“I said, ‘Geez, since I stopped smoking, I just been getting sick,” she joked.

But she doesn’t really believe that.

Harris was part of the smoking cessation class that quit Nov. 30 and she doesn’t regret it a bit.

“It’s better for me,” she said. “I’m the one who is going to benefit from it.”

There was a time when she wouldn’t go in the house without at least two packs of cigarettes waiting for her.

“I used to buy them by the carton,” she said. “That was a staple that was on the list.”

But not anymore.

It’s gotten to the point where Harris doesn’t hang out as much with friends who smoke.

“I just find myself talking about what’s going on with your body and what smoking does to it,” she said. “I don’t try to preach but I just start talking about that.”

David Daniels: ‘Hanging in there’

One of four quitters who said goodbye to nicotine last November, David Daniels is still having trouble letting go.

Once a three-pack-a-day smoker, Daniels now hovers between half of a pack and a whole pack.

He’s trying.

“I’m hanging in there,” he said.

Both of his parents smoked his entire life, Daniels said, and one day when his father put down a lit cigarette, 13-year-old Daniels picked it up and took a puff.

“I figured if my dad was doing it, it was OK,” said Daniels, now 43. “I about choked to death.”

Years later, Daniels’ father discovered his son was a smoker and “to put it bluntly, he was pretty pissed,” Daniels said. “He wanted something better for me.

“And I can’t blame him now that I have a child of my own,” Daniels added. “You don’t want your kid smoking.”

Daniels is still fighting health problems and though he can’t blame the smoking for all of them, he knows the habit doesn’t help.

“You could have a cold and smoking will help you sustain a cold and make it worse,” he said. “Smoking, if you got problems already, can make them get really, really, bad. And if you don’t have problems, it will sure help you develop them.”

Approaching four months since his quit date, Daniels had already identified stress as a trigger for his smoking.

Now he’s working on a way to handle his anxiety without lighting up.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0374 or boutten@coxohio.com.

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