Day 2 - First Day of Classes

First day at smoking cessation classes, I was a bit dubious going, wandering whether you have to stand up and do the whole introduction rigmarole as I hate speaking in front of people.

Well we arrive waiting in room 301 what was stated in the email we got at work, half an hour goes by no sign of anyone else apart from 5 of us. Turns out we were in the wrong room - great start!

There are ten of us in the classroom and we all get handed out a brochure pack some of which you can see pictured here, quite a bit of reading. Now there was no sort of official stand up and ' Hi my name's Dave and I have been a smoker for 18 years and blah blah blah' thank god!! The woman taking the course is a very nice woman her name is Amber and she has a general chit chat and then goes over the various ways of stopping smoking and how they all work (most of which I have already tried). Most of the products are Nicotine Replacement Treatments (NRT's) which is like your patches, gum, lozenges, nasal spray and the inhalator. Amber just goes over the different ones explaining a little bit about them and how you can actually combine them, which I had never really thought about before but a common combination seems to be the patches with the inhalator. Someone asked about hypnotherapy but she didn't say too much on that as it's not medically proven. So then it was onto Zyban and Champix, now they both seem to work in a similar way, i.e you smoke for the first week while taking them and then pick a stop date in your 2nd week. I didn't really like the side effects associated with the Zyban and someone piped up with a story about someone having a heart attack while using them, now there is side effects with the Champix but they didn't sound quite as bad as the Zyban. We had to kind of indicate what method of stopping we would be most likely to use, myself and one of my colleagues Yvonne wanted to try the Champix, where others preferring NRT or some cold turkey.

Doing the Champix or Zyban requires you getting a voucher from your advisor (Amber) which you then take to your doctor who will have a little chat and write you a prescription for the starter pack.

So that was easy roll on next meeting!!