“My mum got diagnosed with lung cancer, she’d been a heavy smoker all her life and it was actually when she got diagnosed with secondaries to her brain that I just went ‘I can’t - I don’t want my kids to go through this.’ So I just went ‘I’ve got to do it now, it’s now or never.’

I know now, like it’s taken a long time, that I can’t be that person that has one cigarette here and there because I’ll just go straight back to it and I refuse to be that person anymore. I tried many ways to quit, I’ve tried patches, all the medications, the inhalers, cold turkey. This time I’ve gone patches and that’s working for me, yay!”

Read the transcript:

I think smoking is a very personal choice. I don’t think anyone can totally talk you into quitting, you’ve got to be in the right head space for it to work.

My mum got diagnosed with lung cancer, she’d been a heavy smoker all her life, and it was actually when she got diagnosed with secondaries to her brain that I just went ‘I can’t - I don’t want my kids to go through this.’ So I just went ‘I’ve got to do it now, it’s now or never.’

I think smoking is a really social thing. So if you’re with a group of people that smoke you’ll probably find that the smokers that don’t normally smoke ever, will go ‘oh, go on give me one then, I haven’t had one for how many years.’

It’s the spontaneous cigarettes that just appear I think, because you’re not expecting them and they’re the harder ones to turn down. I’m not afraid to say to anyone, you know, ‘look I’m just quitting, can you not smoke around me? I really don’t want to go backwards.’

I know now, like it’s taken a long time, that I can’t be that person that has one cigarette here and there because I’ll just go straight back to it and I refuse to be that person anymore.

I tried many ways to quit, I’ve tried patches, all the medications, the inhalers, cold turkey, this time I’ve gone patches and that’s working for me, yay!

I think my message to quitters is don’t give up, just keep trying to quit. You know, you’ll come across a time where it’ll just all click into place and you’ll find it easy. If you surround yourself with positive people and you surround yourself with like-minded people who also don’t smoke, you can do it. Just get out and enjoy the world and not have to think ‘when can I have that next cigarette’, you know, ‘this day is going forever, I want a cigarette.’

It’s just so much better, it really is.