Third Attempt With Chantix: Persistence After 30 Years of Smoking

Five years ago, I sat in my doctor’s waiting room and felt sick in a way that had nothing to do with my health. I was back. Again. For the third time in three years, I was sitting in that same plastic chair asking for the same prescription that I had failed to finish twice before, and the shame of that was almost enough to make me get up and leave without saying a word.

I did not leave. I stayed and I asked for Chantix again, and that third prescription was the one that finally worked. I am 53 years old, I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I have not smoked in five years. But I want to tell you about all three attempts, because the two that failed are just as important as the one that did not.

Thirty Years Is Not an Abstraction

I started smoking at 23. I was working at a printing company in the Strip District and nearly everyone on the floor smoked. I had tried it in college but never regularly. At this job it was part of the rhythm of the day. Break time was smoke time. Within six months I was buying my own packs of Camel Lights, and within a year I was smoking through my lunch every single day.

Thirty years later I was still doing it. The job changed many times. The city changed around me. My kids grew up and moved out. My husband quit smoking in 2009 and had been gently and persistently patient about mine ever since. I had tried patches, I had tried the gum, I had walked into my doctor’s office twice for Chantix. Nothing had stuck.

By the time I showed up for attempt number three, I was 48. I had a persistent cough. My dentist kept flagging things at cleanings. I could feel the difference between myself and my nonsmoking friends in ways I was not ready to say out loud. I was still smoking about 15 cigarettes a day.

First Attempt: I Quit the Medication Before the Medication Could Work

The first time I got Chantix, I took it for about three weeks and then stopped.

My reasoning was that the side effects felt manageable enough that I figured I had done the hard work and could coast. I had hit maybe ten days smoke-free and I thought: I have broken the back of this. I do not need to keep taking the pills.

Chantix is meant to be taken for 12 weeks at minimum. Often longer. I knew this. My doctor had told me. I simply decided, on my own and without any real evidence, that I was an exception.

Within two weeks of stopping the medication, I was back to a full pack of Camel Lights. The cravings came back hard and I had no buffer against them. I did not tell my doctor. I just quietly resumed smoking and told myself I would try again at some unspecified future time.

Second Attempt: I Thought I Could White-Knuckle My Way Through It Alone

The second time I got Chantix was about a year later. I took the full course. Twelve weeks. I finished every pill. And I stayed quit for about four months before a bad stretch at work broke me.

What I did not have this time was any support structure. My husband was supportive in the sense that he wanted me to succeed, but he had quit cold turkey years before and had limited patience for explaining how that felt. I did not join a support group. I did not have regular check-ins with my doctor. I had the medication and I had my own willpower and I thought that was enough.

The bad stretch at work was a period of about six weeks where I was working on a contract that went sideways. Multiple late nights, a client who changed direction at the last minute, a team member who quit right when we needed them most. I was stressed in the particular way where your skin feels like it belongs to someone else.

One night at about ten o’clock I walked to the gas station and bought a pack of Marlboro Lights. I told myself it was temporary. It was not temporary. Within a week I was back to where I started.

This failure hurt more than the first one because I had actually done everything right on paper. I had finished the medication. I had gotten further. And I had still ended up here.

The Third Time: What I Did Differently

Walking into my doctor’s office for the third attempt required more from me than I want to admit. She did not make me feel judged. She has been my doctor for over fifteen years and she was straightforward and kind. But the shame I felt was internal, a story I was telling myself about what it meant to have failed twice and to be here again.

What I said to her, and this is the part I think mattered: I told her I did not know how to handle stress without cigarettes. Not in the abstract way I had mentioned it before, but specifically. I said: the last time I quit, I was doing well and then I had six bad weeks at work and I bought a pack at ten at night. I told her the exact mechanics of the relapse.

She referred me to a cessation counselor. Not a therapist exactly, but a woman who specializes in smoking cessation through the health system, who does check-ins and helps you plan for specific situations. I saw her every two weeks during the first three months.

I also joined a quit-smoking support group through UPMC. It met on Thursday evenings at a community room near the hospital. Real people in plastic chairs drinking bad coffee, which felt appropriately Pittsburgh to me.

I took Chantix again, and this time I finished the full course and then asked my doctor if I could extend it. She said yes. I ended up taking it for six months total.

The vivid dreams that Chantix causes are real. They were strange and intense and not always pleasant. I kept a note on my phone of the more bizarre ones. My husband found it one morning and read it over breakfast and could not stop laughing, which helped more than any formal coping strategy.

The Hardest Moment

About two months into the third attempt, I had to go back to my doctor for something unrelated. A sinus infection. And while I was there, in that waiting room, in that same plastic chair, I thought about the other times I had sat there and what had come of them.

That was the hardest moment. Not a craving exactly. More like a reckoning. Sitting in the same physical space where I had started and failed twice and thinking: I have no guarantee this time is different. I am just doing the same thing a third time and hoping the outcome changes.

What got me through it was something the cessation counselor had said early on. She told me that every quit attempt, successful or not, changes something. It deposits information. The first time you fail, you learn something specific. The second time you fail, you learn something else. The third time, you bring all of that with you.

I had learned, specifically, that I could not stop the medication early. I had learned that stress was my deepest trigger and that I needed a plan for bad weeks before the bad week arrived. I had learned that doing it alone did not work for me. None of that knowledge existed before the failures that taught it to me.

Sitting in that waiting room, I made myself list what I knew now that I had not known before. It was not nothing.

What Five Years Looks Like

My cough is gone. It took about a year to fully clear, but it is gone.

I still go to the Thursday group sometimes, though not regularly. I went back as a kind of thank-you after I hit one year, and I have gone a handful of times since. There is always someone in their first few weeks who has a look I recognize, scared and stubborn in equal measure, and I tell them my story when it seems useful.

My husband and I take walks together most evenings. We live near the river and in spring and fall it is genuinely beautiful. We did not do this before, not as a regular thing. I am not sure if I was too tired or too busy or too wired on nicotine to want to be outside without a reason. Now the walk is the reason.

I cook differently. I notice the smell of food when it is on the stove now in a way I did not before. My sense of taste changed too, gradually, over the first year. Food I thought I liked turned out to be things I was just eating. Other things I had been ignoring turned out to be genuinely good.

My kids know I quit. My older daughter was the one who seemed most worried over the years, though she mostly kept it to herself. When I told her I had hit five years she said something simple: I knew you were going to get there. I did not know how to tell her that for most of those five years, I was not sure she was right.

For You, If You Have Already Failed

I wrote down what I wanted to say to the person who is reading this after a relapse, because that is who I would have been most grateful to hear from.

Here is what I know: the number of attempts it takes is not a measure of your character. I know people who quit cold turkey on the first try and I know people who tried twelve times before something finally held. The difference between them is not willpower or strength or how much they wanted it. The difference is usually what they knew about themselves and what support they had in place.

If you failed on Chantix, look at why. Did you stop the medication too early? Did you have no plan for your specific triggers? Did you try to do it without anyone to check in with? Because those are fixable things. None of them mean you are not capable of doing this.

The medication works. The support works. What I could not see from the outside, before I finally got there, is that the failed attempts were not wasted. They were the slow accumulation of knowledge about exactly what I needed to do differently.

Go back to your doctor. Sit in the plastic chair. You have not run out of tries.