Lou Ward Quit Smoking After 19 Years Using Patches and a Stop Smoking Class

My name’s Lou Ward. I’m forty-two, I live in Cleveland, and I haven’t smoked a cigarette in twenty-two months. Before that, I smoked for nineteen years straight without a single day off. Not one.

I started at twenty-three, which I know is later than a lot of people. I wasn’t one of those kids sneaking cigarettes in high school. I started in a bar. I was out with coworkers from the warehouse where I’d just started working, and a guy named Phil offered me a Marlboro Light. I remember thinking it tasted terrible. I also remember smoking three more that same night. Within a month I was buying my own packs. Within six months I was at a pack a day. It happened that fast, and then it just became who I was. Lou smokes. That was a fact about me, like Lou has brown hair, or Lou drives a Silverado.

Why It Took So Long

I’ll be straight with you. For most of those nineteen years, I didn’t seriously try to quit. I told myself I’d quit eventually, the way you tell yourself you’ll clean out the garage eventually. It was always a future problem.

My wife Denise asked me to quit when she got pregnant with our first kid in 2014. I said I would. I cut down to half a pack for about a week, then crept right back up. After our daughter Mia was born, I just made a rule that I wouldn’t smoke inside the house or the car. That felt like enough at the time. Denise didn’t push it. She had bigger things to worry about with a newborn.

I tried once, seriously, in 2020. Cold turkey. I picked a random Monday and just stopped. By Wednesday I was so irritable that Denise told me to either smoke a cigarette or sleep in the garage, because I was snapping at everyone, including the dog. I lasted five days. The headaches were constant, this dull pressure behind my eyes that wouldn’t let up. My concentration was shot. I work as a logistics coordinator now, so I’m staring at spreadsheets and routing software all day, and I couldn’t focus on any of it. By Friday afternoon I left work early, sat in the parking lot of a Circle K on Pearl Road, and smoked two Newport Menthols because that’s all they had. I didn’t even smoke menthols. Didn’t matter.

That was my only real attempt before the one that worked. One try in nineteen years. Looking back, that’s embarrassing, but it’s the truth.

The Stop Smoking Class

In 2024, my doctor at MetroHealth told me about a free stop smoking program the hospital ran. Eight weeks, one session a week, Tuesday evenings. Group setting, led by a counselor named Barb who was a former smoker herself. She’d smoked for twenty-five years and quit in her late forties.

I almost didn’t go. The idea of sitting in a circle talking about my feelings about cigarettes sounded like something I’d make fun of. But Denise had found a lump in her breast that turned out to be benign, and during those two weeks of waiting for the biopsy results, I kept thinking about what happens to Mia and our son Caleb if both their parents get sick. That scared me enough to sign up.

First session, there were about twelve of us. By the end, seven stuck with it. The ages ranged from a twenty-six-year-old woman who vaped and smoked to a seventy-year-old retired steelworker named Jerry who’d been smoking since he was fourteen. That’s fifty-six years. Made my nineteen seem like nothing.

Here’s what the class did that I didn’t expect: it taught me to think about smoking as a system of triggers and responses, not just a craving. Barb had us keep a log for the first two weeks. Every time you smoked, you wrote down where you were, what you were doing, what you were feeling, and how badly you wanted the cigarette on a scale of one to ten. I thought that was busywork until I looked at my log after a week and saw the pattern clear as day.

I smoked the most at three specific times: first thing in the morning with coffee, during my afternoon break at work around 2:30, and after dinner. Those three cigarettes were the ones I craved the most. The rest of my pack was almost automatic, filler cigarettes I smoked out of boredom or habit but didn’t desperately need.

Barb said that’s normal. She said most pack-a-day smokers have three to five “anchor” cigarettes and the rest are just maintenance. If you can plan for the anchors, the others fall away easier.

The Patches

The class recommended nicotine replacement therapy alongside the sessions. I went with patches because I didn’t like the idea of chewing nicotine gum all day, and my insurance covered the NicoDerm CQ through a smoking cessation benefit I didn’t even know I had.

I started on the 21mg patch two weeks before my quit date. Barb was big on setting a specific quit date, telling people about it, and preparing for it like you’d prepare for anything important. My quit date was a Tuesday, March 5, 2024. I told Denise, I told my boss, I told my mom. Saying it out loud to actual humans made it feel binding in a way that just deciding in my head never did.

The first day on the patch without cigarettes was uncomfortable but not the agony I remembered from cold turkey. The patch took the sharp edge off. I still had cravings but they felt like a dull ache instead of a screaming need. The biggest issue was my hands. They didn’t know what to do. I’d been holding a cigarette during breaks for nineteen years and suddenly my hands were just sitting there, empty and useless. Barb had suggested toothpicks, so I went through about a box of toothpicks that first week. Chewing on them, rolling them between my fingers. My coworker Dave said I looked like a character from an old Western movie.

The patch did give me weird skin reactions. Red, itchy squares on my arms where I’d worn them. I started rotating between my upper arms, my chest, and my back. The itching was annoying but manageable. I used some hydrocortisone cream and that helped.

The Hardest Moment

Week three. Denise and I got into a real fight. Not about smoking, about money. About whether we could afford to replace the furnace or if we should try to get one more winter out of the one we had. It escalated the way arguments do when you’re both tired and stressed, and she said something about how I always put off dealing with things, and I knew she wasn’t just talking about the furnace.

I went out to the back porch. It was cold, maybe thirty degrees. I stood there in the spot where I’d smoked thousands of cigarettes, and the craving hit me so hard it was physical. My chest tightened. My mouth watered. I could feel the ghost of a cigarette between my fingers like a phantom limb.

I called Barb. She’d given everyone in the class her cell number for exactly these moments. She picked up on the third ring. I told her where I was and what I was feeling. She didn’t give me a pep talk. She just said, “What are you going to do in the next five minutes?” Not the next month. Not the rest of my life. The next five minutes.

I went back inside. I drank a glass of cold water. I sat on the couch and put on SportsCenter. I didn’t smoke. Five minutes turned into ten, turned into the rest of the night. That was the closest I came.

What the Class Taught Me That I Couldn’t Learn Alone

The biggest thing was hearing other people say out loud the exact things I thought only I felt. Jerry, the seventy-year-old, talked about how he’d light a cigarette and feel ashamed before he even finished it. I’d felt that exact thing for years and never told anyone. A woman named Tricia talked about hiding cigarettes from her kids and the constant low-grade guilt of it. I’d done that too. Smoked on the side of the house where Mia’s bedroom window wasn’t, so she wouldn’t see me.

There’s something about hearing your own secrets come out of someone else’s mouth. It breaks the isolation of it. Smoking is weirdly lonely even when you’re doing it with other people. The shame part, the part where you know you’re hurting yourself and you do it anyway, that part you carry alone. The class cracked that open.

Barb also taught us about the “rule of threes.” Cravings come in waves and most peak at about three minutes. If you can distract yourself for three minutes, the worst passes. Three days is when the nicotine is mostly out of your system. Three weeks is when the daily habits start to rewire. Three months is when most people who are going to relapse will relapse. Knowing those numbers helped me brace for each stage instead of being blindsided by it.

Stepping Down the Patches

I followed the NicoDerm CQ step-down program. Three weeks at 21mg, then three weeks at 14mg, then three weeks at 7mg. The step-downs were noticeable. Going from 21 to 14 felt like someone had turned the thermostat down a few degrees. Not freezing, but you could feel the difference. I was more fidgety, a little more on edge. Going from 14 to 7 was easier. And coming off the 7mg entirely was surprisingly anticlimactic. By that point I’d gone almost nine weeks without a cigarette. The physical addiction was mostly broken. What was left was the behavioral stuff, the reflexes, reaching for my pocket, stepping outside after meals. Those faded slower but they faded.

Life Now

Twenty-two months out. Here’s what’s different.

I can run with Mia. She’s ten now and she’s fast, and I can actually chase her around the yard without gasping. Last summer we rode bikes on the Towpath Trail, went about eight miles, and I kept up fine. Two years ago that would’ve been impossible.

I can taste food again. Denise makes this stuffed pepper soup every fall and I thought I’d been enjoying it for years, but the first time I had it after quitting I realized I’d been eating a muted version of it the whole time. The difference was startling.

I’ve put on about twelve pounds, which I’m not thrilled about. Quitting smoking messes with your metabolism and I definitely ate more snacks in the first few months as a substitute. I’m working on that now. Walking more, cutting back on the Werther’s and peanut M&Ms that got me through the early weeks.

I don’t hate the smell of smoke on other people, the way some ex-smokers claim to. I get it. I know why they’re doing it. But I do notice it now on my clothes when I come home from being around smokers, and that awareness alone is a reminder of what I must’ve smelled like to Denise and the kids for almost two decades.

The money is real. I was spending close to three hundred a month on Newports. That’s almost $3,600 a year. In twenty-two months I’ve saved roughly $6,600 by not smoking. We got the new furnace.

To You

If you’re reading this and you’re still smoking, I’m not going to tell you something you don’t already know. You know it’s bad. You know you should stop. Knowing isn’t the problem. The problem is doing it, and doing it alone makes it ten times harder.

If I can give you one piece of advice it’s this: don’t try to quit in a vacuum. Find a class, find a group, find a counselor, find someone who’s been through it. I’m a private person. I don’t like talking about my feelings in front of strangers. The idea of a stop smoking class made me cringe. And it was the single most important thing I did.

The patches handled my body. The class handled my head. I needed both.

You’re not alone in wanting to quit and being terrified that you can’t. Every person in that circle of chairs on Tuesday nights felt the same way. Half of them are smoke-free now too. Jerry, the seventy-year-old? Fourteen months and counting. If he can do it after fifty-six years, you can do it too.

My name’s Lou. Nineteen years of smoking. One failed attempt. One class, one box of patches, and a counselor named Barb who answered her phone on a cold Tuesday night. That’s what it took. Find your version of that. It’s out there.