Smoking Causes Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

The cue-card for today is not ‘smoking can cause carbon monoxide poisoning’ – because CO-poisoning happens every time you smoke. Carbon monoxide is caused by burning something without there being quite enough oxygen available for it to burn properly, like when dried tobacco leaves are burned in a paper tube.

What happens is that the hemoglobin in your red blood cells, having picked up normal O² molecules from the lungs, carries those molecules to oxygen-burning cells throughout the body, and picks up the resultant CO² molecules. Upon returning to the lungs, the CO² is released and the blood cells try to pick up more O² in order to keep doing their thing. But when there’s carbon-monoxide present in the lungs, it will bond approximately 230 times more readily to hemoglobin than oxygen will!

Hemoglobin has four ‘binding’ sites, and thus can carry four O² molecules at a time. When a CO molecule binds to one of these sites, the chemical attraction of oxygen to the other three binding sites is increased, resulting in that hemoglobin molecule being unable to release the O² molecules to oxygen-hungry cells.

Essentially, a red blood cell infected by carbon monoxide becomes useless to the body, and stays that way until it dies and is replaced by another one. The average lifespan of a single red blood cell is about four months. For people severely afflicted with carbon-monoxide poisoning, this basically amounts to suffocation on a cellular level – even while the lungs are taking in and expelling plenty of air.

There’s a lot of other horrible damage done by carbon-monoxide poisoning besides its affinity for binding with hemoglobin. For more information check out Wikipedia’s page on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO_poisoning

Benjamin Chun

I’ve still been putting too much carbon-monoxide into my lungs by burning little paper tubes of tobacco. As I said yesterday morning, the way that I’ve been smoking hasn’t been the same as it used to be – it’s become much more about simply doing what I’m used to doing and engaging in whatever social elements remain in smoking with others out on the balcony here…

I recall from earlier success (even as temporary as both occasions turned out to be…), in becoming a non-smoker that having other things to put my attention into helps a great deal to avoid obsessing over the cigarette I could be smoking right now if only I wasn’t – but to rely on that sort of thing in order to make the simple act of not smoking a cigarette easier seems ultimately self-defeating. I’ve got so many things demanding my attention now that the idea that it would be easier not to smoke if my attention was devoted elsewhere just doesn’t make sense.

Walter’s Special Technique promises that, rigorously applied, the reading of those daily cue-cards will result in the desire to smoke cigarettes disappearing altogether… The two times I used it and easily stopped smoking, it certainly wasn’t as though I’d never been a smoker and didn’t have the idea of cigarettes in my mind or anything – so I imagine that when the day comes again that I give them up, I’ll go through a week or two of weirdness… But if it’s going ot be the same as the last two times, that weirdness will be a lot more about understanding how easy it would be to smoke, and sort of marvelling at the fact that even knowing that I don’t feel any sort of compulsion to.

I’m toying with the idea of just trying to delay my first cigarette of the day by six hours. It’s been easy for awhile now not to smoke for an hour or two after waking up – but when I started using this technique again awhile ago I resolved to really hammer it home and let it sink in and keep sinking in… I remember the first two times the effects I noticed in the weeks before stopping were that every cigarette I smoked tasted awful, (suggesting that there’s some psycho-somatic elements of enjoying the flavour of tobacco-smoke in the first place), and that slight but manageable feelings of nausea and dizziness appeared even as I was unthinkingly smoking less frequently than before…

I’ve noticed some of that this time around, but the difference is that this time around I’ve been drinking just about every day as well… Well, that’s one of the differences anyway. Another is that I don’t have a girlfriend upon whom to psycho-defensively project my obsessions, and it feels like that’s the way it ought to be.

So that’s it then – I’ve decided. Tomorrow morning, when I wake up, I’ll have coffee as usual, breakfast as usual, and go about my business as usual, and I won’t smoke a cigarette until at least six hours after waking up – just to have a better gauge of how far along Walter’s Special Technique has brought me so far, this time. After that, I’ll have a better idea of what quit-date to set, or whether I’m even at the point where setting one is appropriate.

Naturally, I’ll report on the results before the day is out.