a horrible warning

I usually title my posts with a song title from the past but for this post, I thought I'd use part of the wonderful Catherine Aird quote, "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to serve as a horrible warning."

Today is my 29th month quit smoking anniversary ..... yay, me! But when the wonderful Quitnet website sends me monthly e-mails to remind me to celebrate my anniversaries, they always also include a statistical approximation of how much time I have added to my life span due to my quit.

I have been quit for almost two and a half years and so far -- according to their estimates -- I have added only 4 months, 14 days, and 18 hours to my life. Why so little? Because I was an idjit who smoked for 35 years ..... that's a helluva lot of damage to undo. Someone who has only smoked for 10 years is going to see their regained life span estimation explode compared to mine.

Now I know that the additional 4 months number is far from set in stone -- I could die tomorrow or I could live another 30 years -- but my hope is that there is some young smoker out there who reads this and decides to quit sooner rather than later so that they regain their expected life-span light-years faster than I do.

Let me serve as your horrible warning. Please.