My Final Attempt at 63: Patches Finally Worked After Decades of Trying

My name is Rose Turner. I’m 63 years old and I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and two years ago I finally quit smoking after 40 years and more failed attempts than I have any hope of accurately counting.

I want to tell this story because when I was in the thick of it, trying and failing and trying again, there were not enough voices telling me that the attempts themselves had value, that failing a dozen times didn’t mean I would fail forever, and that it was not too late for me to succeed even at 63. I had to figure those things out on my own, slowly, and I’d like to save you some of that work.

Forty Years

I started smoking at 23, which was 1986. Salem Lights, because my roommate bought them and I liked that they felt milder, softer somehow, easier to pretend weren’t cigarettes. That lasted about six months before I switched to Marlboro Lights and stayed there for the next four decades.

I smoked through two pregnancies, which I am not proud of. Both my children were born healthy, but I think about that now with a kind of sick guilt that no amount of time has completely erased. I smoked through my divorce. I smoked through my mother’s death. I smoked through my second marriage, which was good, and through my husband Gary’s retirement, and through both my kids’ weddings. I smoked through all of it, and I told myself a hundred times that quitting was something I would do eventually, at a better time, when I had less stress, when things settled down.

Things never settled down. That’s the lie we tell ourselves.

The Attempts

I stopped counting my quit attempts somewhere around the fifteenth. Some of them were serious, sustained efforts that lasted weeks or months before I relapsed. Some of them lasted three days. A few lasted only one. I tried cold turkey four or five times. I used the patch twice in the 1990s but I was going through the motions and I knew it. I tried Nicorette gum and hated the taste. I tried the nicotine inhaler and found it helped but not enough. I tried Wellbutrin in 2008, which reduced the cravings somewhat but not to a manageable level. I tried Chantix in 2015 and got about three weeks smoke-free before a stressful family situation unraveled me.

After the Chantix attempt, I went four years without seriously trying. I told myself I was a person who smoked and that was simply who I was. I told myself some people just can’t quit, and maybe I was one of them. Gary didn’t smoke and he’d encouraged me gently for years without making it a condition of anything, and I’d worn out my own capacity to hear his encouragement without feeling ashamed. I just stopped talking about it. I lit my cigarettes in the garage instead of on the back patio where I’d feel his eyes on me through the glass.

The shame of being 60, 61, 62, and still smoking was considerable. I felt like a person who had been handed the same test repeatedly and failed it every time. That doesn’t make you feel like someone who should try again.

What Was Different at 63

My primary care doctor, Dr. Patel, had been patient with me for a long time. She never shamed me. She documented my smoking history at every annual visit, expressed her concern, and didn’t push when I wasn’t ready. At my appointment in the spring two years ago, she asked if I’d be open to trying something new.

What she proposed wasn’t a new drug. It was NicoDerm CQ patches combined with a structured support program through the Arizona Smokers’ Helpline. Weekly phone check-ins with a quit coach. A specific quit date on the calendar. Accountability built into the plan.

The thing that had been different in every previous attempt, I told her, was that I’d always quit alone. I’d tried and failed and tried and failed in private, carrying the shame of each relapse privately, starting each new attempt in secret so nobody would know if I failed again. The secrecy was protective but it was also isolating. Every relapse confirmed a story I was telling only myself: that I couldn’t do this.

Dr. Patel heard that. The helpline was her response to it.

I agreed to try. I made the appointment to be set up with a quit coach. I set my quit date for three weeks out.

The NicoDerm CQ Steps

I used NicoDerm CQ starting with the Step 1 patch, 21mg, because I was smoking more than ten cigarettes a day. You wear it for 16 to 24 hours, replacing it each morning. The instructions say you can remove it at bedtime if you have sleep disturbances, which I did in the first couple weeks, so I started taking mine off before bed around night three.

The patch delivered a steady baseline of nicotine that made the first days much more tolerable than cold turkey had ever been. I still had cravings, but they had a ceiling on them. The desperate, climbing intensity of cold turkey withdrawal, where each craving feels like it might break you, was absent. The patch cravings peaked and passed within a few minutes if I kept busy.

After eight weeks on Step 1, I moved to Step 2, the 14mg patch, for two weeks, then Step 3, the 7mg patch, for two more weeks. The step-down worked as advertised. Each transition brought a brief intensification of cravings that faded within a few days.

Weekly Check-ins

The quit coach I was assigned through the Arizona Smokers’ Helpline was a woman named Karen, and those weekly calls were, in my opinion, the real reason this attempt succeeded when others hadn’t.

We talked for 20 to 30 minutes each week. She asked specific questions about how the past week had gone, what situations had been hardest, what was coming up in the next week that might be challenging. She helped me think through coping strategies in advance rather than improvising in the middle of a craving. She was not surprised by difficulty and she didn’t treat my struggles as failures. She’d heard everything. Nothing I told her made her sound discouraged about my prospects.

When I told her about my previous fifteen-plus attempts, she said something I’ve thought about often since: that every quit attempt, even the ones that ended in relapse, had taught me something about what smoking did for me and what I’d need to replace it with. The attempts hadn’t been wasted. They’d been data.

I’d never thought of them that way. I’d only thought of them as losses.

The Hardest Part

The hardest moment of my quit was not the first week, which I’d been braced for and which the patch made bearable. It was week five.

Week five, I woke up one morning and felt a sudden, nauseating wave of shame about being 63 and still fighting this. I’d been smoke-free for five weeks, which should have felt good, and I was crying in my bathroom instead, because five weeks was nothing compared to 40 years, and 40 years was such a long time to have done this to myself, and I was so tired of this thing having taken up so much of my life.

I called Karen before I’d even had breakfast. She listened to all of it. She didn’t try to talk me out of the feeling. She said shame about the past was real and she wasn’t going to minimize it, but she also said something I have written down and kept: “Rose, the only way to honor the 40 years is to not add a 41st.”

That was the day I understood something. The guilt and shame I felt about my decades of smoking were not reasons to give up. They were reasons to finish.

Two Years Smoke-Free

I am 63 years old and I have not smoked in two years and three months. My lung function tests have improved. My chronic morning cough, which I’d had so long I’d stopped noticing it, is completely gone. Gary tells people I look younger, which he’s allowed to say because he’s my husband and I believe he means it.

I walk in the mornings in our neighborhood before the Phoenix heat arrives. Forty minutes, sometimes an hour. There is something clarifying about moving your body in the early morning quiet that I could not have accessed when I smoked, because my body was too compromised and my habits were too fixed.

The shame I carry about 40 years of smoking has not disappeared, but it has changed form. It is quieter. It sits alongside the knowledge that I stopped, that I didn’t let it have the last word.

I tell everyone who will listen: it is never too late, and no number of previous attempts means the next one won’t be the one that works. I wasted years believing that my failure history predicted my future. It did not.

To You, If You’ve Tried Before and Failed

I want to speak directly to anyone who has tried to quit and relapsed, once or five times or twenty. You are not a special case for whom quitting is impossible. You are a person who hasn’t found the right combination yet.

What finally worked for me was adding structured support to medication. The patch alone wasn’t enough in my previous attempts because I was always alone with it. The weekly calls made me accountable and gave me a place to process the difficulty without carrying it alone.

If you’ve tried cold turkey, try NRT. If you’ve tried NRT alone, add coaching. If you’ve tried that, talk to your doctor about Zyban or Chantix. There are more tools than there used to be, and the tools work differently for different people. Keep looking for the combination that’s yours.

You are not alone. The number of times you’ve tried before is not your story. What you do next is your story.

Pick a date. Start there.