Jerry Vasquez: 24 Years of Smoking, Done in One Decision

I started smoking when I was twenty-three. I know that’s later than most people you’ll hear from, and I used to tell myself that meant I wasn’t really hooked. That I could stop whenever I wanted. I said that for twenty-four years.

I’m Jerry Vasquez. I’m forty-seven years old, I live in Sacramento, California, and I haven’t had a cigarette in fourteen months. Writing that still feels strange to me.

How It Started

I picked it up working construction out in Elk Grove. Everyone on the crew smoked. You’d take a cigarette break, shoot the breeze, and get back to work. It was social. It was something to do with your hands during downtime. I was smoking maybe five or six a day at first, and I figured that was nothing. My dad smoked two packs a day for thirty years before he quit, so in my mind, I was barely a smoker.

Within a year I was at a pack a day. Marlboro Reds at first, then I switched to Camel Filters because a buddy told me they were “smoother.” Smoother. Like that mattered. I was inhaling burning plant matter into my lungs every forty-five minutes, and I was worried about smoothness.

By the time I was thirty, I was a pack and a half a day and I’d stopped pretending I could quit anytime. I knew I was stuck.

The Attempts

Let me count them up. My first real quit attempt was at thirty-one. My wife, Maria, was pregnant with our first kid. I told her I’d quit before the baby came. I lasted eleven days. The irritability was unbelievable. I snapped at Maria over how she loaded the dishwasher and I knew right then I was going to cave. I bought a pack at the 7-Eleven on Florin Road at two in the morning and smoked three in the parking lot before I even drove home.

Attempt two was at thirty-four. I tried the patch. Nicoderm CQ, the 21mg step one. It helped with the physical cravings a little, but I had vivid, disturbing nightmares every single night. I’m talking dreams where my teeth were falling out and I was drowning in a swimming pool full of cigarette ash. After two weeks, I ripped the patch off and went back to smoking because I couldn’t handle the sleep disruption on top of everything else.

Attempt three was at thirty-seven. I tried Chantix. My doctor prescribed it, and for about three weeks it worked great. The cigarettes started tasting metallic and weird. But I started having dark moods. Not just feeling down. I mean sitting in my truck after work not wanting to go inside my own house. When I told Maria, she looked scared, and I stopped the Chantix the next day. I was smoking again within a week.

Attempt four, thirty-nine. Went to a hypnotherapist in Midtown Sacramento. Cost me four hundred bucks. I’ll admit I felt relaxed after the session. I didn’t smoke for three days. Then I was stuck in traffic on I-5 for ninety minutes because of a wreck near the causeway, and I reached for the glove box where I always kept an emergency pack. That was the end of that.

Attempt five, forty-two. Tried vaping. Got one of those Juul devices. Switched completely for about two months. Then I realized I was hitting the thing constantly, probably getting more nicotine than ever, and when a coworker offered me a real cigarette, it felt like coming home. Went right back to Camels.

That’s five attempts over thirteen years. Each one made me feel more like quitting was something other people could do but I couldn’t.

What Finally Worked

In January 2025, I went to the doctor for a persistent cough. It had been hanging around for about six weeks and wouldn’t clear up. The doctor did a chest X-ray and some breathing tests. He sat me down afterward and told me my lung function was declining. He said I didn’t have COPD yet, but I was headed straight for it. He showed me the numbers on the spirometry test and said, “Jerry, you’ve got maybe a five-year window here. If you quit now, your lungs can recover a lot of this. If you don’t, you’re looking at an oxygen tank by sixty.”

I don’t know why that one hit different from everything else. Maybe because my daughter, Sofia, had just turned fifteen and I could see her wedding day in my mind. Maybe because the number was so specific. Five years. Maybe I was just finally ready.

I went cold turkey the next morning. January 14th, 2025. I threw out the two packs I had at home, the one in my truck, and the emergency pack in my toolbox at work. Maria watched me do it and didn’t say a word, which I appreciated because by that point she’d heard me make promises before.

But this time I also bought a box of Nicorette gum, the 4mg cinnamon flavor, and I told myself it wasn’t a failure to use it. That was the difference from my other cold turkey attempt. I wasn’t trying to prove how tough I was. I was trying to actually quit. If that meant chewing a piece of gum when the craving got so bad I couldn’t think straight, then that’s what I’d do.

The Hardest Moment

Day three was rough, but it wasn’t the worst. The worst was day nine. A Saturday. Maria took the kids to visit her mother in Stockton and I was home alone for the first time since quitting. I was restless in a way I can’t fully describe. It was like my skin didn’t fit right. I cleaned the entire garage, reorganized my tools, washed both cars, and I still felt like I was crawling out of my own body.

Around 4 PM I found myself standing in front of the gas station on Freeport Boulevard. I hadn’t consciously driven there. I was just there, like my body had autopiloted. I was reaching for my wallet when I pulled out a piece of the Nicorette instead. I chewed it so hard my jaw ached. I stood in that parking lot for fifteen minutes, chewing that gum and watching people walk in and out of the store buying cigarettes, and I did not go inside.

That was the moment. That was when I knew this time was going to be different, because in the past, I would have been inside that store before I even finished the thought. The gum gave me just enough of a buffer to let the rational part of my brain catch up to the addicted part.

The Turning Point

About six weeks in, I woke up on a Sunday morning and realized I’d slept through the night without coughing. That hadn’t happened in years. I lay there in bed just breathing, in and out, feeling my lungs expand fully without that wheeze, without that rattle. It was quiet in a way my chest hadn’t been quiet in a long time.

I went for a walk around the neighborhood. Not a run, just a walk. And I could smell things. The jasmine in my neighbor’s yard. Cut grass. The coffee shop on 21st Street. These are things that had been there forever, but I’d lost them so gradually I didn’t know they were gone.

I sat down on a bench at McKinley Park and I cried. Not dramatic, movie-style crying. Just tears running down my face while I sat there smelling jasmine and breathing clean. I was forty-seven years old and I was smelling jasmine for the first time in twenty years.

Life After Quitting

I’m fourteen months out now. I still chew the Nicorette occasionally. Maybe two or three pieces a week, down from eight to ten a day in the first month. My doctor says that’s fine, that the gum is infinitely safer than cigarettes and I should taper at my own pace. I’m not in a rush. I’m not smoking, and that’s what matters.

Here’s what’s changed. I can play basketball with my son, Marco, who’s twelve, without gasping after five minutes. I can taste food again. Maria says I don’t smell like an ashtray anymore, which apparently was something she’d been holding in for years. My persistent cough is gone. My follow-up spirometry showed my lung function improved by about 12 percent, and my doctor said it could keep improving for several more years.

I’ve saved roughly $4,200 in the last fourteen months. In Sacramento, a pack of Camels runs about ten bucks. That’s $300 a month I was literally burning. We used that money to take the family to Monterey for a long weekend last summer. Watching my kids play on the beach, breathing ocean air with lungs that actually worked, I thought about all those years I wasted on those things.

The cravings still happen. I won’t lie about that. They’re rare now, maybe once a week, and they pass in a few minutes. They used to last twenty or thirty minutes and feel like a vice grip on my brain. Now they’re more like a passing thought. “A cigarette would be nice right now.” And then the thought moves on, and so do I.

The weight gain was real. I put on about fifteen pounds in the first three months. I was eating sunflower seeds, hard candy, anything to keep my mouth busy. I’ve since lost about ten of those pounds by walking more, but I’d rather carry an extra five pounds than carry a pack of cigarettes.

To the Person Still Smoking

I’m not going to tell you that quitting is easy. After five failed attempts, I’d be a liar if I said that. But I will tell you that the right time to quit is the time that sticks, and you won’t know which attempt that is until you try again.

If you’ve tried and failed, you’re not weak. You’re addicted. There’s a difference. Nicotine rewired your brain, and it takes time and sometimes some help to rewire it back. I needed gum. Maybe you need patches, or Zyban, or a support group, or all of the above. Use whatever works. There’s no prize for doing it the hard way.

I spent twenty-four years convinced I’d always be a smoker. I was wrong. You might be wrong too.

You are not alone in this. Millions of people have stood in front of that gas station, reaching for their wallet, and walked away instead. I’m one of them. You can be one of them too.

My name is Jerry Vasquez. I’m forty-seven years old, I live in Sacramento, and I don’t smoke anymore.