A week amongst the shadows of the past: lessons learnt from a scientific study

How about lighting a cigarette after five years of being smoke-free? God forbid, it would be dumb of me. But for a scientific study I changed my mind for a week. Was it good? Hell, no. Was it beareable? Yes, it was. Would I smoke again? No bloody way. Has it worth it? Indeed it has, way beyond the scope of the study itself.

The study conducted by Prof. Dr. László Galuska at the University of Debrecen examines the effects of smoking and vaping on the lung functions and the changes of the permeability of the membrane between the alveoli and the lungs. Initially the professor wanted to work with smokers who would have to switch to vaping for three weeks, but apparently they couldn't just simply abandon smoking for weeks. With a clever twist, the professor turned to long-time vapers to examine what does a week of smoking do to their lungs.

Like most of us, I was hoping that the study will successfully conclude without me having to smudge my lungs - trust me, it is quite a decision to make. Unfortunately this was not how things were going, and the deadline for the study started to approach pretty fast with not enough samples yet to hit the sweet spot where the the results could be considered serious enough for publication. With a final push the community came together to fill the missing spots, and I ended up in one of the groups of four with Endre, Levente and Miklós.

The joys of nuclear medicine: we are radiating.

The examinations performed are not bad at all, there is no pain involved, they are not invasive, no one is opened up, and it's all done in 30 minutes. Half a day still passes though, as you wait while the others are being examined, and the travel takes its own time as well. The hard part of course is not this, but to force yourself - in many cases after being smoke-free for years - to smoke 10-20 cigarettes of your choice daily for a week. I aimed for 15 fags a day, and while sometimes it was very hard to stick to it, I managed to do it.

So, how is smoking again after 5.5 years? Horrible. I had to realize instantly that my memories of smoking are being very far from the harsh reality. What I was remembering was the experience of smoking for a body already familiar with and tolerant of smoking. With a twist of a thumb I suddenly became that stupid teenager again, smoking his very first cigarettes behind the school, unable to stop drooling as the smoke burns his face off.

I feel dizzy from the nicotine peak and and the CO overtaking the place of oxygene in my blood, I am literally drooling, but I can't swallow it as it is tasting hideous, so I end up chain-spitting like a moron. The smoke is irritating my eyes, my fingers smell awful, my mouth smells and tastes terrible. Is this what I've been doing for twenty years, is this what I made my body accustomed of? Indeed, it is.

Then comes the epiphany. I thought I knew how different vaping is from smoking, what vaping made me free of. I realize that I had no idea, I've only seen the tip of the iceberg. This is the moment when I finally understand what smoking really is, and what vaping is in comparison, now that after almost six years I smoke my very first cigarette again. If on the scale of uncomfortable things smoking is a fist punching your face, then vaping is like a loving fondle.

Anyone who claims that vaping is a gateway to smoking is someone who never smoked a cigarette, or simply is an utter fool. Vaping is a gateway to smoking as much as chocolate is a gateway to coprophagy.

But how does it feel to once again smoke for a week? It is quite frightening to feel your whole body revolting against the insult, as you keep inhaling the insane amount of toxins. Knowing that you do it with re-born, clean lungs makes it even worse. You keep recalling studies on the effects of tobacco smoke and its various additives and you understand your former smoker self who kept doing it for years less and less. And the most scary of all is to experience how fast your body starts to tolerate something with no pleasure whatsoever, or even, the exact opposite of pleasure, the putrid taste of tobacco smoke.

Epic lungs! Here with no clue about what is going to be unleashed upon them.

The first four days were about the struggle to keep going on, I was sure I can't do it, and the last three were about clinging to the hope that it is almost over. In the meantime I drink water like there is no tomorrow, I can literally feel my kidneys overworking themselves to get rid of the toxins somehow.

The smoke burns the insides of my mouth, my saliva flows like a river, my clothes smell, my hands smell. I am nauseous, I feel sick, dizzy, I can not believe I did this for twenty years, I can not believe that not only the body is able to get used to this, but in the end it identifies it as pleasure. When I am not outside smoking, it's enough to smell my hands to get nauseous again. I don't feel healthy, I think I feel the toxins circulating in my bloodstream, I imagine chemotherapy to be something like this.

Random coughs arrive on day two as the lungs try to get rid of the crap accumulating in them. Me and my fellow victims communicate a lot on Facebook, and knowing that I am not alone in this unfit shoe eases the suffering to some degree. Maybe the toxins, maybe the lack of oxygene, but a mild, but constant headache settles in for days.

On day three it still takes some willpower not to barf during the first cigarette of the day. Subsequent fags are no longer that awful, inhaling the smoke is not that nauseating, but the aftertaste in my mouth is still hideous. I have to switch toothpaste, my current one is simply unable to get rid of the taste and smell of smoking. I keep thinking on how one (for instance our local TC body) might think that flavoring is able to supress the awfulness of burning tobacco and paper for a newbie smoker. At most it might make it less crappy for regular smokers, but it can't be able to make initiation less painful.

From the fourth day morning coughs become constant. I no longer feel healthy in general, not even between the smoking sessions. Of course, these are deep waters, no new smoker starts with daily fifteen cigarettes, and this also makes them unable to see the whole offense they are about to unleash on their body. The smell of smoking no longer irritates me that much, but its taste remains unbearable. It is strange, but I feel hungry all the time. I can't think of anything else but that my normal diet is not sufficient enough to cover the increased energy needs of detoxification. I see a guy on the street lighting a cigarette, and the sight makes me nauseous.

The fifth day makes the first cigarette of the day considerably less awful. The front of my mouth no longer feels the effects of the smoke, but the backside and my throat still feels uncomfortable.

The product of six days, 90 butts. Used to be my average daily amount before.

On the sixth day the first fag is now bearable, but I smoke doubles to get over the daily quota faster, and there is nothing that makes the second one enjoyable. It is clearly harder to breathe, my breathing became shallower than usual. There is unrest in my lungs, they feel relaxed no more.

By the seventh day I get used to the taste of smoke. Smoking is now feels almost entirely like I remembered it from before. There is one significant difference though, the nicotine burst still makes me lightheaded. So much for the claim that vaping sustains nicotine dependency or even strengthens it. It is truly marvelous, the ability of our National Institute for Health Development's Tobacco Focal Point, to be as much inaccurate about vaping as possible. If there is room to be wrong, you can rely on them to be wrong. Short sharp pain sensations pop up now and then in my lungs, and my throat has been replaced with something burnt and insensitive. The taste of coffee no longer feels delicious, and this is something not even twenty years of smoking was able to ruin before.

The morning of the eighth day brings back the old sensation of my lungs being smaller, tighter. It is unbelievable that I used to wake up like this every day and I simply chose to dismiss and ignore it. But it is almost over, only a few cigarettes left, and a trip to Debrecen, and I am done.

This is how my week went. It was interesting as well as scary to experience how my quality of life deteriorated day by day, and how the body gets more and more used to something so unpleasant, so alien to life.

The team: Levente, myself, Miklós and Endre.

These experiences made me think a lot about what motivated me back then to get used to smoking and become its slave for twenty years. I've found three things that might have been a catalyzer.

One of these is the smoking of parents. For a child of smokers the body develops some tolerance to cigarette smoke which makes it easier to get used to smoking, easier to get past the otherwise terrible sensation.

The other is the influenceability of kids. Starting smoking in a group pushes kids to toughen up and try to act as an "adult", to not show weakness, to ignore the awful feeling of inhaling smoke. This manual override of the mind certainly makes the initiation phase a lot easier.

The third one is alcohol. For most of the kids, experimenting with beverages overlaps with experimenting with smoking, and alcohol dulls the senses enough to notice the awfulness of smoking less and less. It can't be a coincidence that my old four packs a day habit skyrocketed to as many as eight packs on any given day when the evening involved beers.

But it is over, the week has passed, what now? One thing I am sure of. Unless an even more crazy regulation tears my e-cig out of my hands, I will smoke never again. I got rid of my remaining cigarettes without a hassle and happily returned to my former non-smoking vaper self.

After one day I found myself a bit more irritable and itchy than usual, but I don't miss smoking at all. If it is because of the abrupt end of smoking, it is very interesting that the impact of a daily dose of 12 mgs of nicotine inhaled with cigarette smoke is much more serious than 60-90 mgs of nicotine vaped daily. Of course we know that nicotine in itself does not induce the same level of dependency like it does when comsumed together with other constituents of tobacco smoke, and that the body absorbs nicotine less effectively from e-cigarette vapor than from tobacco smoke, but experiencing the difference first-hand is quite a revelation.

For a while I surely won't enjoy flavors as much as I used to, but knowing that I no longer fill my body with insane amounts of toxins and carcinogens is a relief in itself. The additional experiences I had over the week, the putting of the undampened horrors of smoking into proper perspective is just an added bonus.

I can't wait to see the results of this study to occupy its spot in the scientific literature, I know no other study to examine the enormous benefits of vaping over smoking from this aspect. Until then a few more of us have to man up of course and join the study as a volunteer. Despite all the bad stuff I am happy that I did, otherwise I would never have realized fully what vaping liberated me from, how thankful I should be that electronic cigarettes exist.

Kudos to the other volunteers who have had the same terrible week before and along with me, without you I am not sure I would have been able to succeed. For the others coming after us I wish tenacity, it will be hard, it will be extremely unpleasant, but you can do it.

Ps: If you are there, I recommend checking out Restaurant Viktória, their fried cheese is awesome.