Sean O’Brien: I Quit Smoking on St. Patrick’s Day and Never Went Back

There’s a joke in my family that an O’Brien can do anything as long as you dare them to do it on March 17th. My grandfather quit drinking on St. Patrick’s Day 1961. My uncle Kevin quit gambling on St. Patrick’s Day 1988. And on March 17th, 2024, standing on Western Avenue in Chicago after the South Side Irish Parade, I smoked my last cigarette.

I’m Sean O’Brien. I’m forty-five. I’ve lived on the southwest side of Chicago my entire life. Mount Greenwood born, Beverly raised, and now I own a house in Evergreen Park, about three blocks from the parish where I was baptized. I smoked for twenty-two years, and I’ve been quit for just over two years.

A Pack of Pall Malls and a Bad Crowd

I picked up smoking at twenty-three. Late start, I know. I’d made it through high school and through four years at Illinois State without touching a cigarette, which in the ’90s and early 2000s was actually an accomplishment. But after college I came back to the South Side and started working for my uncle’s plumbing company, and every single guy on the crew smoked. Pall Mall Blues were what they smoked, so that’s what I smoked. Peer pressure doesn’t stop at eighteen. Anyone who tells you it does has never worked a trade.

It started casual. A few during the workday, one or two at the bar after. Then it was a pack a day by the time I was twenty-five. By thirty it was a pack and a half on a heavy day, and every day was starting to feel heavy. I smoked through my wedding to Colleen in 2009. I smoked through the births of our three kids: Brendan, Siobhan, and little Patrick. I smoked on the back steps of my house in January when it was fifteen below zero because Colleen wouldn’t let me smoke inside. The addiction was stronger than Chicago winters, and if you’ve ever stood outside at Halsted and 111th in February, you know that’s saying something.

Trying and Failing

First attempt was in 2012. Brendan was two years old, and Colleen was pregnant with Siobhan. She asked me to quit for the new baby. I tried the Nicorette lozenges, the mint ones. They made me nauseated and gave me hiccups. Ridiculous, embarrassing hiccups that would last for an hour. I stuck with them for about ten days before I decided I’d rather smoke than hiccup through every conversation I had. Stupid reason to quit quitting, but there it is.

Second attempt, 2015. I tried Chantix because a buddy at the plumber’s union said it worked for him. It did reduce my desire to smoke, I’ll give it that. But the dreams were something else. Vivid, bizarre, and dark. I dreamed I was trapped in a burning building and couldn’t find the door, and I woke up soaked in sweat with my heart hammering. After two weeks of dreams like that, I stopped the Chantix and smoked a cigarette that same morning. The relief was immediate and that relief was the trap.

Third attempt, 2018. Went cold turkey on January 1st, like every other New Year’s resolution that doesn’t stick. I made it seventeen days. Seventeen. On the eighteenth day, I was dealing with a burst pipe in a customer’s basement in Bridgeport and the homeowner was screaming at me about water damage and I was soaked to the elbows in sewage water, and I walked out to my van and smoked three Pall Malls in a row. The world got quiet again. That’s what nicotine does. It doesn’t fix anything, but it makes you stop caring that nothing’s fixed.

Fourth attempt, 2020. The pandemic. I figured if there was ever a time to stop putting garbage in my lungs, it was during a respiratory virus pandemic. I used patches, the Nicoderm CQ 21mg. They worked better than anything else I’d tried. I made it five weeks. Then bars reopened and I went out with the guys from the union hall and someone handed me a cigarette and I just took it. Five weeks of progress gone in one moment of weakness at a bar on Western Avenue.

Four attempts, four failures. I started to think that quitting smoking was something other people could do. People with more discipline, more reasons, less stress. Not me. I was a smoker. Always had been, always would be.

St. Patrick’s Day, 2024

This is where the family tradition comes in. Every year, the O’Briens go to the South Side Irish Parade. Every year, we pack into my uncle’s house on Washtenaw afterward for corned beef and too many people in too small a kitchen. It’s loud, it’s chaotic, and my aunt Mary always cries during “Danny Boy.” It’s the best day of the year.

March 17th, 2024 was a Sunday. I was standing on the sidewalk after the parade, smoking a Pall Mall, and my daughter Siobhan, who was nine, walked up to me. She didn’t say a word. She just looked at the cigarette in my hand, then looked at me, and then walked back inside. That was it. No lecture, no “Daddy, please stop smoking.” Just that look. Nine years old and she already knew what cigarettes meant.

I looked down at my Pall Mall. I looked at the house where my uncle was playing fiddle music and my kids were eating soda bread. And I thought about my grandfather, who quit drinking on this exact day sixty-three years ago and never touched a drop again. He used to say, “An O’Brien who makes a promise on St. Patrick’s Day answers to the saint himself.”

I stubbed the cigarette out on the bottom of my boot. I walked inside and told Colleen, “That’s it. I’m done. I quit on St. Paddy’s Day and I’m not going back.” She looked at me the way she’d looked at me four times before when I’d said similar things. Patient, hopeful, but guarded. She just said, “Okay, Sean.”

Going Cold Turkey for Real

No patches. No gum. No Chantix. Nothing. Just me and my stubborn Irish brain against twenty-two years of nicotine dependency. Looking back, I probably should have used some kind of aid. I’m not a tough guy. I’m a plumber from the South Side who is afraid of spiders. But something about the St. Patrick’s Day promise made me feel like I had to do it clean. My grandfather quit drinking without AA, without rehab, without anything but willpower and whatever deal he made with St. Patrick. If he could do that, I could do this.

Days one through three were physical hell. Headaches, sweating, an inability to focus on anything for more than thirty seconds. I was running jobs and I kept misreading measurements. I nearly cut a pipe two inches short on a remodel in Oak Lawn. My hands shook. My temper was on a hair trigger. Colleen took the kids to her mother’s for the first weekend because I was, in her words, “unbearable.”

Days four through ten were the mental battle. The physical symptoms eased up, but the cravings were relentless. Every single trigger was still there. Coffee in the morning. Getting in the van. Finishing a job. Eating lunch. Talking on the phone. Everything I did had a cigarette attached to it, and suddenly all those attachments were ripped away.

The Hardest Moment

Day fourteen. A Tuesday night. I was in the garage, reorganizing my tools for the twentieth time because I needed something to do with my hands. Colleen was inside putting the kids to bed. I found a pack of Pall Malls in the pocket of an old work jacket. There were four cigarettes inside. They were probably stale, but they were there. In my hand.

I stood in that garage for what felt like an hour. It was probably five minutes. I held the pack and I could feel the cellophane under my fingers and I could smell the tobacco through the wrapper and every nerve in my body was saying just one, just one, no one will know. Colleen was upstairs. The kids were asleep. I could smoke one, throw the rest away, and nobody would ever know.

But I would know. And I’d made a promise on St. Patrick’s Day.

I walked out to the trash can in the alley and threw the pack in. Then I poured the leftover coffee from the kitchen pot over them so I couldn’t fish them out. I went back inside and my hands were shaking and I sat on the kitchen floor and put my head between my knees and breathed until the shaking stopped. That was the night I almost lost it. That was also the night I won.

The Turning Point

Six weeks after quitting, Brendan had a baseball game. He played for the Evergreen Park Little League, and he was pitching. I sat in the bleachers and I watched the whole game without once getting up to sneak a cigarette behind the concession stand. I’d done that at every single game before. I’d watch an inning, go smoke, come back, watch another inning, go smoke. I’d missed at-bats, I’d missed plays, I’d missed moments of my son’s childhood because I was standing behind a cinder block building sucking on a Pall Mall.

This time I saw everything. Brendan struck out two batters in a row and he looked over at me in the stands and I was there. Right there, watching. He pointed at me with his glove and grinned. That’s the moment. That’s when I knew I was done with cigarettes for good. My kid pointed his glove at me and I was actually present for it.

Life After

It’s been just over two years. Two St. Patrick’s Days as a nonsmoker. At the parade in 2025, Siobhan held my hand the whole time. She didn’t say anything about it, but she held my hand, and I think she knew.

I can run a flight of stairs carrying a water heater without feeling like my chest is going to explode. My morning cough, the one Colleen used to call my “old man hack,” is gone. I’ve gained about twelve pounds, mostly because I replaced cigarettes with cashews and I can’t stop eating cashews. Colleen says she’ll take a slightly heavier husband over a smoker any day.

I’ve saved over $7,000. Pall Malls in Cook County were about ten bucks a pack with the taxes. That’s $300 a month I was spending to poison myself. We used some of the savings to take the kids to Wisconsin Dells last summer. Colleen and I are putting the rest toward Brendan’s college fund.

The cravings still come. Maybe once a month now, usually when I’m stressed about a job or when I smell someone else smoking. But they pass in a minute or two. They don’t have the power they used to have. The beast is still in the cage, but the cage got stronger.

To the Person Still Smoking

I failed four times. Four. And the fifth time worked, not because I found the right medication or the right program, but because I found the right moment. You’ll find yours too. Maybe it’s a look from your kid. Maybe it’s a family tradition. Maybe it’s something nobody else would understand but it makes perfect sense to you. The important thing is to be ready when that moment comes.

And if you’re not the cold turkey type, don’t try to be. Use the patches, use the gum, use the pills. I did it my way, but my way isn’t the only way. The only way that doesn’t work is the way that keeps a cigarette in your hand.

You are not alone. There are millions of us out here, former smokers who were absolutely certain we couldn’t quit, and we did. I was a pack-and-a-half-a-day plumber from the South Side of Chicago who couldn’t go ninety minutes without a Pall Mall. If I can do this, you can do this.

Make your promise. Pick your day. And don’t go back.

My name is Sean O’Brien. I’m forty-five, I live in Chicago, and I haven’t smoked in two years. Happy St. Paddy’s Day.