Today sucked. Didn't smoke, though.

Yesterday morning at 8:50AM, I had all four wisdom teeth extracted. I remember the laughing gas -- I was breathing it in through a nose-shaped cup. It made my voice lower and I had a weird pins-and-needles feeling, floaty and dizzy. I remember the IV being hooked up to my hand. I remember the oral surgeon asking me a few simple questions.

The next thing I remember, I was lying on a bed in the recovery room, and I noticed the very dry gauze in my mouth, which seemed to be the only thing holding it together. Rob was at my side, along with the surgery tech. They said I had bolted toward the recovery room. I don't remember a thing. I couldn't talk at all, so I stopped trying.

I rested there a few minutes, then they were encouraging me to get up, so gingerly, with Rob and the tech's help, I did. I was in space, and not feeling particularly good. My tongue, lips and jaw were numb.

Rob helped me to the car, and we took off. Fortunately, home was five minutes away, aside from a stop at Walgreen's to drop of my prescriptions.

I flopped into bed and Rob propped me up on several pillows and brought me icepacks wrapped in towels, one for each side of my face. The icepacks felt good. He exchanged the old gauze for new gauze. 30 minutes later, we were done with the gauze.

I tried to read and tried to get on the laptop to play SimCity or fool around on MySpace, but I just didn't have the energy, and my fingers were shaking as I tried to type. My fingers are still shaking a little bit today, almost 24 hours later.

Rob brought me some yogurt, which took me forever to eat, but it was nice and cool.

I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew, he was back with all of the prescriptions.

He had a packet of anti-inflammatories, a prescription bottle of pain pills, a prescription bottle of enormous pink amoxicillin pills, and a mouth rinse. He gave me six anti-inflammatories, two pain pills and an amoxicillin. I managed to swallow it all. Then about 15 minutes later, I ran into the bathroom and vomited up the whole cocktail.

Rob called the oral surgeon's office, and as I suspected, it wasn't a big deal. I didn't need to take anything again, which was good, because I didn't feel like overdosing on anything. They told Rob to make sure I ate a little something every 30 minutes. This drove me nuts all day--I just wanted to sleep for hours, and he kept having to wake me up.

Rob was a good caretaker. He exchanged out my ice packs every couple of hours, didn't let me keep them on too long, made sure I ate soft food and drank water, made sure I took more pain pills (against my protests), kept me company, held my hand, and kissed me on the forehead.

My mouth stayed partially numb all day, including my lips and the tip of my tongue. That was really annoying.

I tried getting up to watch "The Blues Brothers" at around 7:30 pm, but found I didn't have enough energy even for that. I got maybe 2/3 of the way through, and then had to go to bed.

Today I woke up still feeling dizzy and weak, but my teeth (or tooth sockets) didn't hurt at all. I haven't even taken Advil yet, much less the strong pain medication. I ate some grits, followed by applesauce. Gotta love that no-teeth cuisine.

I have a two-page handout about post-op care, and in big letters at the bottom it says "NO ALCOHOL, NO SMOKING, NO CARBONATED BEVERAGES FOR AT LEAST 3 DAYS FOLLOWING SURGERY".

Yet another reason I'm glad I don't smoke! Not that I could imagine trying to smoke with my mouth the way it is.

Good morning, world,

It's 7:04 AM on May 16, 2006, one year since I quit smoking. It feels wonderful to be able to say I made it once around the sun without smoking. If I can do this, I really can quit and stay quit for life.

My brothers are still on the wagon, over 2 months now. Rob is threatening to quit in September, or whenever the new cigarette tax goes into effect in Texas. I'm not sure how much the tax hike is; I've heard it's about a dollar.

Every day there are more reasons to quit, and fewer reasons to smoke.

The other day, we were stopped at a light by 183, and just ahead of us was a Mitsubishi eclipse with four high school-age kids, all smoking. One was ashing through the sun roof. It was like looking back into my past, 10 years ago, when it might've been me in that car. I hoped for them that they weren't addicted, or that they would all be able to quit soon, sooner than I did.

You can't smoke anywhere these days, not even in bars, since Austin passed a smoking ban last year. You haven't been able to smoke in offices for years. Some companies here forbid smoking on company property (even outdoors). Now, you could argue that it's a nazist way to discourage smoking, and I might agree with you, but it's always hard to defend a habit that is essentially harmful.

Anyway, today is my one-year quittiversary. Hooray me!

It's so close, I can almost taste it...

Here it is, May 2, 2006, and my one-year quittiversary is a mere 14 days away. I can hardly believe it.

Time is a strange concept, isn't it? Sometimes I feel like it's been years since I smoked, sometimes I wake up wondering if I smoked the night before. (I didn't, of course.)

It dawned on me last night that the entire time I lived in my last apartment, I did not smoke. Of course, I only lived there from September to February, but still, that's a first, since I've been of the age to live in apartments. While I was living in that last, pretty little apartment at the Falls, I knew I wasn't smoking, of course, but the totality of living there and never smoking just didn't occur to me.

My brothers are now well over a month into their quits, and really, they are exactly the same guys, except that they don't step out on the porch every 45 minutes or so. It's definitely more obvious when someone takes up smoking than quits--people tend not to notice when someone isn't doing something.

Which makes it all the more challenging to quit smoking...

I'm impressed with the way their quits are going. They both seem very level-headed and determined to quit.

I am so happy to find myself staring down the "finish line" of my first year being smoke-free. Of course, it's an illusory finish line, there are many months and years ahead of me, and I want all of them to be smoke-free.

That's no reason not to celebrate, though. My bros and I talked about having some kind of celebration on May 16th. We haven't worked out the full details yet, but I'll be damn sure to post that day...

See you then!