I Quit Smoking at 67 After 45 Years With Nicotine Patches

My name is Bob Dawson. I’m sixty-seven years old, I live in Jacksonville, Florida, and I quit smoking fourteen months ago. I smoked for forty-five years. I started at twenty-two and I stopped at sixty-six. Almost everyone told me there was no point in quitting at my age. My body was already damaged. The harm was done. I’d heard it from friends, from family members, even from a doctor once, years ago, who shrugged and said, “At this point, the stress of quitting might be worse than the smoking.” I believed them for a long time. They were all wrong.

I started smoking in 1981. I was working on a shrimp boat out of Mayport, before the fishing industry there went sideways. Everybody on the boat smoked. The captain smoked at the wheel. We smoked while we pulled nets. We smoked while we ate. If you weren’t sleeping, you were smoking. I picked up Pall Mall Reds and stayed with them for forty-five years. Never switched brands, never went to lights, never considered it. Pall Malls were cheap and strong and that suited me fine.

I went from the boat to a boatyard doing fiberglass repair, then to a job at the Jacksonville Electric Authority, where I worked as a lineman for twenty-three years before my knees gave out and I moved to a desk position in operations. Retired in 2022. Through every single one of those jobs, through marriage, through the birth of my two sons, through my divorce in 1998, through my second marriage to Brenda in 2004, through grandchildren and funerals and hurricanes and everything else life threw at me, I smoked. It was the one constant.

Let me tell you about my quit attempts because the number is embarrassing. I tried to quit eleven times over forty-five years. Eleven. I could list them all but it would take the whole story, so here are the highlights.

1989: Cold turkey. Four days. My oldest son, Danny, was born and I wanted to be a better man. The withdrawal made me so irritable that my first wife, Linda, told me to either smoke or sleep in the garage.

1995: Nicotine gum, Nicorette, the original kind that tasted like pepper and rubber. Two weeks. I was chewing it at work and a transformer blew on a line I was working near and the shock of it, the noise, the flash, sent me straight to a convenience store for a pack. Fear and smoking were wired together in my brain.

2001: Zyban. My doctor prescribed it and I took it for six weeks. It helped some with the cravings but gave me dry mouth so bad I was drinking water constantly and still felt parched. I stopped taking it during a fishing trip with my buddies because I didn’t want to explain the pills and I was back to smoking that same weekend.

2007: The patch. NicoDerm CQ, 21mg. This was my most serious attempt at that point. I made it five weeks. Five good weeks. Then Brenda’s mother died and we flew to Tallahassee for the funeral and the grief cracked me open and I smoked in the parking lot of the funeral home and hated myself for it.

2014: Cold turkey again. Three days. That’s it. Three days. I don’t even remember what broke me. Probably just existence.

There were others in between, half-hearted attempts that lasted a day or two and barely count. Each failure made the next attempt feel more pointless. By my sixties, I’d accepted smoking as a permanent feature of my life, like my bad knees or my thinning hair. Some things you just live with.

What changed was a Tuesday in December 2024. I was sitting in my recliner watching the Jaguars lose, which they do frequently, and I tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t. Not in the usual way where you’re a little short of breath. I mean I physically could not fill my lungs. I got maybe halfway through an inhale and hit a wall. Like there was a belt tightened around my ribcage. I tried again. Same thing. I sat there for five minutes trying to take a full breath and failing.

Brenda drove me to the Baptist Health ER on Barrs Street. They did a chest X-ray, bloodwork, and a pulmonary function test. The doctor, a young woman who looked about the same age as my granddaughter, came back with the results and told me I had moderate COPD. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. My lung function was at about 58 percent of what it should be for a man my age and size. She explained that COPD is progressive, meaning it gets worse, but that quitting smoking could slow the decline significantly and might even improve my function somewhat.

Then she said something that landed differently from anything a doctor had told me before. She said, “Mr. Dawson, you’re sixty-six. If you quit now, you could have fifteen or twenty more years. If you don’t, you might have five, and they won’t be comfortable.”

I looked at Brenda. She was sitting in the plastic chair next to my bed with her purse in her lap and her eyes red. She didn’t say quit. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me the way she looks at me when she’s trying not to beg.

I had my last Pall Mall in the hospital parking lot that night. Brenda stood next to me and waited while I smoked it. I remember the orange glow reflecting off the hood of her Camry and the sound of the ambulance bay doors opening and closing behind us. I ground the butt out on the concrete and dropped it in the trash can by the entrance. Brenda took my hand and we walked to the car and drove home.

The next morning I went to Walgreens and bought NicoDerm CQ patches. The 21mg starter kit. I’d tried patches once before, seventeen years earlier, and they’d worked okay until life got in the way. This time I wasn’t going to let life get in the way because life was exactly the point.

The patches in 2024 are better than what I used in 2007. Thinner, more flexible, less irritation. I put one on my upper back, between my shoulder blades where it wouldn’t bother me, and I wore it for the recommended sixteen hours a day. The steady nicotine delivery took the worst edge off the cravings. It didn’t eliminate them, not by a long shot, but it turned a ten out of ten craving into about a six. A six I could handle.

The first week was still terrible. My body had been receiving nicotine every waking hour for forty-five years. Even with the patch, the sudden change in delivery method threw everything off. I was constipated, I was foggy, I couldn’t sleep right. I’d wake up at 3 AM and lie there with my fists clenched, wanting a cigarette more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. I’d get up and eat cereal in the kitchen in the dark, staring at the microwave clock, waiting for the craving to pass.

I got through those nights by thinking about my grandkids. Danny’s kids, Olivia and Jake, twelve and nine. My younger son Marcus’s daughter, Penny, who was four. I thought about Olivia’s volleyball games and Jake’s science fair projects and Penny running across the yard yelling “Pawpaw!” when I pulled up to Marcus’s house. I thought about the doctor’s math. Five years versus twenty. At five years, I’d see Olivia graduate high school but maybe not college. I wouldn’t see Jake’s. I wouldn’t see Penny’s. At twenty years, I’d see all of them and then some.

The hardest moment of the whole process was three weeks in. I was at the VFW hall on Beach Boulevard for a fish fry, the kind of thing I’ve been going to for thirty years. Half the guys there are my age or older and most of them smoke. My buddy Ray, who I’ve known since the JEA days, came out to the parking lot where I was getting some air and lit a Pall Mall, my brand, right next to me. He didn’t know I was quitting. The smell of that specific cigarette, the Pall Mall Red smell that had been part of my identity for four and a half decades, hit me and I swear my hands moved toward his pack on their own. I actually touched the box. My fingertips were on the cellophane. And I pulled back like I’d touched a hot stove.

Ray looked at me funny. I said, “I’m quitting.” He stared at me for a second and then said, “Bob, you’ve been smoking longer than my first marriage. You serious?” I said yeah. He nodded slowly and put his pack in his jacket pocket, out of my reach, without me asking. That’s a good friend. He hasn’t offered me one since.

I stepped down through the patch levels over ten weeks. Twenty-one to fourteen to seven. Each step-down was noticeable but manageable. The 14mg was a bigger adjustment than the 7mg. By the time I came off the patches entirely, I’d been nicotine-free in my mind for so long that the last patch felt like a formality.

Fourteen months later, here’s where I am. My COPD hasn’t gone away. It won’t. That damage is done and I own it. But my lung function has improved to 64 percent, up from 58. My pulmonologist says that’s a meaningful improvement and better than she expected. I can take a deep breath now. Not a full, young-man breath, but a real one. I can walk to the mailbox without pausing. I can play with Penny in the backyard for twenty minutes straight. Before, I was good for about five.

I can smell Brenda’s gardenias in the front yard. I can taste her biscuits the way they’re supposed to taste, buttery and warm with a little bit of salt. Forty-five years of smoking stole those things from me so gradually that I didn’t notice they were gone.

The money. Lord, the money. Pall Malls in Florida were about $7.50 a pack. At a pack a day, that’s $2,737 a year. Over forty-five years, even accounting for lower prices in the early years, I spent well over $80,000 on cigarettes. I try not to think about what that money could have been. A down payment on a beach house. My grandkids’ college funds. A boat that didn’t smell like smoke.

In the fourteen months since I quit, I’ve saved about $3,200. Brenda and I used some of it to buy a tandem kayak. We go out on the Intracoastal on Saturday mornings. I paddle in the back and she steers in the front and the air smells like salt and marsh grass and nothing else.

My clothes don’t smell anymore. Brenda stopped doing my laundry separately. She kisses me without that half-second pause where she’d decide whether the smoke smell was tolerable. These are small things that add up to a completely different daily life.

I want to talk directly to anyone reading this who’s over sixty and still smoking. I know what you’re thinking because I thought it too. What’s the point? The damage is done. I’ve been doing this too long to change. My doctor practically said as much. Here’s the truth: your body wants to heal. It’s been waiting for you to give it a chance. Even at sixty-seven, my lungs found six extra percentage points of function. My heart rate improved. My blood pressure dropped. Every single day you don’t smoke is a day your body uses to repair what it can.

And even if the improvements are modest, consider this: would you rather spend your remaining years struggling to breathe, smelling like smoke, and watching your grandkids keep their distance? Or would you rather spend them on a kayak on a Saturday morning, breathing salt air, with the person you love?

The patch works. It’s not dramatic. It’s not exciting. You slap it on in the morning and it slowly feeds you just enough nicotine to keep the worst cravings at bay while your brain unlearns forty-five years of habit. It’s boring, and boring is exactly what you need, because smoking was exciting and exciting almost killed me.

Talk to your doctor. Get the patches. Tell your buddy Ray or whoever your Ray is, and let him put the pack in his pocket.

You are not alone. I’m sixty-seven years old and I smoked for forty-five years and I’m sitting here today with clean lungs and a kayak and a four-year-old granddaughter who climbs in my lap without wrinkling her nose. If I can do this, you can do this. It is not too late. It is never too late.