“When I got really, really, really sick with pneumonia I almost died, and it was a bit of a wakeup call.”

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When I got really, really, really sick with pneumonia, I almost died and it was a bit of a wakeup call. I was sitting outside my house barely being able to breathe... It was so ridiculous, and I’m smoking. And my 21 year old daughter was sitting in the kitchen through the glass looking at me. She lost total respect for me in that moment, she was just shaking her head.

Here this girl, young girl, who’s just watched her mum almost die for the last few weeks in hospital, and she comes home and she has a cigarette. I just looked at the cigarette and threw it away and I haven’t smoked since.

Only if you’ve smoked can you understand, it’s a lifestyle... So in order to quit smoking
you do have to have a whole new lifestyle. So for me, the obstacles were falling back into those old habits. I had a place on the bench where my cigarettes and my wallet and my handbag and everything sat. And I would catch myself walking there, even though my cigarettes weren’t there, I’d already thrown those out... And I’d be standing there going ‘why was I here?’ and then that realisation of ‘you were there to roll a cigarette’.
That was scary!

I couldn’t successfully quit smoking and still do everything that I used to do. I had to change everything, and that included my job.

My good friend Nikki, we go everywhere together, and now I’m finding it really hard to go anywhere with her because she smokes in her car. We used to see each other nearly every day. In the last three or four months I think I’ve seen her twice. She came around to see me and because I didn’t smoke I think it made her uncomfortable, which is really sad.

I miss her a lot, we have great, we have great laughs when we’re together. But I do struggle around her when she smokes and it does make life hard. I would like to say to her ‘please stop smoking in your car! Just quit so we can have fun again and go in car rides and have fun like we did without the cigarettes. If we did it together we could support one another.’