As we introduce the whole vapor-inhaling thing to our bodies, no matter what issue we may have, it's extremely unlikely that we're the first person who ever experienced it.
Poke around the forum, and you'll find 23 gazillion whats, some posted by people who've had the your specific what du jour, and how they solved it. Maybe their solution will work for you, or maybe you'll find a different workaround that you can post for the next person who needs it.
We who live with chronic pain and illness know that whatever we're doing or not doing, the one thing we can count on is that we'll have good days - and Those Days We Hope Will Be Better Tomorrow.
Illness is kind of like a baby. If you or a loved one has ever obtained or observed one of those, you may have noticed that they don't really care what's going on in the lives and hearts and bodies of the adults around them.
Young girls with romanticized notions of motherhood are often reminded that a newborn baby is the most selfish creature there is.
I'll put it a little less politely. We're all born solipsistic sociopaths. Luckily, most of us grow out of at least some of it.
The Ravages of Disease and Age, however, don't. Those selfish solipsopaths could care less whether we're trying to get acquainted with our e-cigarette. And neither does their evil spawn, Those Days We Hope Will Be Better Tomorrow.
In fact, on some of Those Days, our bodies seem not only indifferent, but actively hostile to the great favor we're trying to do it.
These evil spirits can manifest themselves as anything - from digestive unrest to lip and tongue discord to cardiovascular and endocrine insurgency to (insert your favorite symptom here) or all of the above.
A change in formulation, dosage, even the "filler" composition of some pill you've been taking for years, hormonal changes, whether of pharmaceutical origin or your own biochemical shenanigans, can bring about subtle differences in sense perceptions that totally trash all our mantras, stomp all over our embryonic preferences, and cackling with diabolical laughter, stuff all our developing methodologies into the nearest trash-masher.
Whether it's related to our fledgling e-cigarette use or not, the effect is the same: what tasted good yesterday doesn't. The "throat hit" that yesterday felt Juuust Right!, today is just plain unpleasant - or just plain not present.
Maybe you've caught yourself a case of those lip issues, dutifully read about it in the forums, but the mint in Burt's Bees is impacting the taste of all the flavors you like. (Team Menthol probably doesn't have this problem. Who said life was fair?)
If it's in the guise of digestive discord, it could be related to your new e-cigarette use, or it could be related to Great Auntie Mina's famous cheese straws, which never bothered you before, but for some unfathomable reason, this time they did.
Or maybe, as previously bemoaned, it's that vague thing called wooziness, which might or might not be your regular pill-spawned wooziness just kicking up its heels a bit.
It could just be One of Those Days.
While you go all detective and discover that it was Mr Plum in the laundry room with a broken iPod, (and good luck with that), as far as getting acquainted with your electric hookah-doodle goes, the only thing you can do is start over.
Change, flavors, change nicotine levels. See if its better or worse with a wireless one for a while.
TechNote: The electric hookah-doodle is powered by a larger number of electricity molecules than its wireless sibling, so if yesterday's Juust Right! puff is making you cough today, and that's the only thing that's wrong, you might be able to solve the problem by just switching over to wireless ones until it passes. Some days we're just more delicate.
While we're on the subject of coughing and being delicate, it's reasonable that a couple of weeks of a significant, even dramatic, increase in coughing frequency will not exactly go unnoticed by our already frail bodies.
That itself can irritate our throats to the point where the Juust Right! Puff-o-Meter curls up into a ball and shuts down.
If you've already been alternating between 0 and not-0 to reduce coughing fatigue, have 0-nicotine only Puffing Practice for a day or two, then try something with a low nicotine number in a wireless.
If you're Not Allowed To Cough, if you can get ahold of a Smart Shaman, ask about the possibility of an alternative nicotine delivery method that you can use along with your zero-nicotine e-cigarettes - not even necessarily all the time, just when you're having Those Days.
Being old, you already know that for just about any kind of digestive unpleasantness, few things are more effective than ginger. Determine the best ingestion method for you, and get some into your system. There's even a ginger juice you can put into your electric hookah-doodle, but we'll talk about that when we get to Advanced Class.
If Puffing Practice is making you feel queasy, take a break. If tobacco cigarettes are also making you queasy, smell some yard dirt and take a nap.
Sleep is not only the best beauty treatment, it's the best thing you can do for just about anything that ails you.
When you're feeling better, gently pick up where you left off. Don't try to make up for lost time.
Because we're in this for the long haul, not as a project or a test of our iron will and ability to withstand discomfort, but with the goal of making a permanent and sustainable transition, it's extremely important that we associate e-cigarettes with pleasant sensations and feeling good.
We want them to be just as comforting and familiar as our tobacco cigarettes are, and though our memories may be fuzzy, tobacco cigarettes did not become comforting and familiar from one day to the next.
When we first started smoking, it wasn't pleasant. It was work. It hurt. It made us cough. It even made some of us throw up.
Tobacco cigarettes only became comforting to us once we got past that and could inhale the smoke comfortably. After that, it took years, decades, of smoking dozens of the things every day before they became an extension of our fingers.
Yes, for some people, it is instant. As previously bleated, that wouldn't be a good idea for us anyway. But at some point, we may begin to feel impatient. Even if we've intellectually accepted that we can't literally throw out our tobacco cigarettes the day we pick up our first electric one, emotionally we may still get annoyed with ourselves because we still want the tobacco ones. We still like them.
On the days when it all goes to hell, if we let them, the same instant magic stories that inspired us before we started can now make us feel discouraged and displeased with ourselves, but we're not going to let them, because that's counter-productive and not even fact-based.
We are neither bad nor weak nor a disappointment or a failure. We're just old sick people who had a bad day or several that We Hope Will Be Better Tomorrow - just like we always had before we ever picked up an e-cigarette.
"Every person is unique" isn't just a tired platitude, it's an established biological fact. It's hard science.
Here's some more hard science: Every time we practice puffing our electric hookah-doodle, we're not smoking a tobacco cigarette.
In the forums, Gel Toy (not his real name) commented to me that every half hour I'm practicing with my electric hookah-doodle means one less tobacco cigarette that day.
That was waay more encouraging than Gel Toy (not his real name) had any idea it would be.
Every half hour I'm practicing with my electric hookah-doodle means several fewer tobacco cigarettes that half hour.
Of course we all want that number of tobacco cigarettes to eventually be 0.
And we want eventually to happen sooner rather than later, and we want the road to eventually to be 100% Those Days-free.
We all have long lists of things we want, from Tuscan villas to the return of our teenaged torsos. (My personal top 3 have always been the powers of teleportation, invisibility, and flight).
Thanks to the existence of e-cigarettes, phasing out tobacco ones has now been moved from the villa and teleportation list to the list of possible and attainable things we want - like seeing some of our closet floor again someday, or learning more about the evolution of dangdut.
Ceasing to inhale the toxins of tobacco cigarettes into our lungs is - at last - something we CAN do.
This is MAJOR cause for rejoicing!
It'll happen when it happens - if we keep working toward it, keep on building those same Pleasant Thing neural pathways for it that we built for our Marlboros and Camels and Gauloises and Puros.
On Those Days when washing your hair or the round trip downstairs to fix coffee and bring it back up, is your Everest, the work of Puffing Practice can be so arduous that nothing is going to keep you at it, or even doing it at all.
When that happens, the single most important thing we can do for ourselves is just roll with it, put our fingers in our ears and refuse to listen to the siren calls of despair and self-sabotage, whether they beckon us dressed up as self-pity, self-trashing, or envelope-pushing.
Training ourselves to go with the flow now, to keep our eyes on that prize even on the days we're not able to reach for it, is our best chance at making this transition a complete and permanent one.
There will be days when it all goes to hell.
Get a stick, fish it out, and return to your regularly scheduled rejoicing.
Poke around the forum, and you'll find 23 gazillion whats, some posted by people who've had the your specific what du jour, and how they solved it. Maybe their solution will work for you, or maybe you'll find a different workaround that you can post for the next person who needs it.
We who live with chronic pain and illness know that whatever we're doing or not doing, the one thing we can count on is that we'll have good days - and Those Days We Hope Will Be Better Tomorrow.
Illness is kind of like a baby. If you or a loved one has ever obtained or observed one of those, you may have noticed that they don't really care what's going on in the lives and hearts and bodies of the adults around them.
Young girls with romanticized notions of motherhood are often reminded that a newborn baby is the most selfish creature there is.
I'll put it a little less politely. We're all born solipsistic sociopaths. Luckily, most of us grow out of at least some of it.
The Ravages of Disease and Age, however, don't. Those selfish solipsopaths could care less whether we're trying to get acquainted with our e-cigarette. And neither does their evil spawn, Those Days We Hope Will Be Better Tomorrow.
In fact, on some of Those Days, our bodies seem not only indifferent, but actively hostile to the great favor we're trying to do it.
These evil spirits can manifest themselves as anything - from digestive unrest to lip and tongue discord to cardiovascular and endocrine insurgency to (insert your favorite symptom here) or all of the above.
A change in formulation, dosage, even the "filler" composition of some pill you've been taking for years, hormonal changes, whether of pharmaceutical origin or your own biochemical shenanigans, can bring about subtle differences in sense perceptions that totally trash all our mantras, stomp all over our embryonic preferences, and cackling with diabolical laughter, stuff all our developing methodologies into the nearest trash-masher.
Whether it's related to our fledgling e-cigarette use or not, the effect is the same: what tasted good yesterday doesn't. The "throat hit" that yesterday felt Juuust Right!, today is just plain unpleasant - or just plain not present.
Maybe you've caught yourself a case of those lip issues, dutifully read about it in the forums, but the mint in Burt's Bees is impacting the taste of all the flavors you like. (Team Menthol probably doesn't have this problem. Who said life was fair?)
If it's in the guise of digestive discord, it could be related to your new e-cigarette use, or it could be related to Great Auntie Mina's famous cheese straws, which never bothered you before, but for some unfathomable reason, this time they did.
Or maybe, as previously bemoaned, it's that vague thing called wooziness, which might or might not be your regular pill-spawned wooziness just kicking up its heels a bit.
It could just be One of Those Days.
While you go all detective and discover that it was Mr Plum in the laundry room with a broken iPod, (and good luck with that), as far as getting acquainted with your electric hookah-doodle goes, the only thing you can do is start over.
Change, flavors, change nicotine levels. See if its better or worse with a wireless one for a while.
TechNote: The electric hookah-doodle is powered by a larger number of electricity molecules than its wireless sibling, so if yesterday's Juust Right! puff is making you cough today, and that's the only thing that's wrong, you might be able to solve the problem by just switching over to wireless ones until it passes. Some days we're just more delicate.
While we're on the subject of coughing and being delicate, it's reasonable that a couple of weeks of a significant, even dramatic, increase in coughing frequency will not exactly go unnoticed by our already frail bodies.
That itself can irritate our throats to the point where the Juust Right! Puff-o-Meter curls up into a ball and shuts down.
If you've already been alternating between 0 and not-0 to reduce coughing fatigue, have 0-nicotine only Puffing Practice for a day or two, then try something with a low nicotine number in a wireless.
If you're Not Allowed To Cough, if you can get ahold of a Smart Shaman, ask about the possibility of an alternative nicotine delivery method that you can use along with your zero-nicotine e-cigarettes - not even necessarily all the time, just when you're having Those Days.
Being old, you already know that for just about any kind of digestive unpleasantness, few things are more effective than ginger. Determine the best ingestion method for you, and get some into your system. There's even a ginger juice you can put into your electric hookah-doodle, but we'll talk about that when we get to Advanced Class.
If Puffing Practice is making you feel queasy, take a break. If tobacco cigarettes are also making you queasy, smell some yard dirt and take a nap.
Sleep is not only the best beauty treatment, it's the best thing you can do for just about anything that ails you.
When you're feeling better, gently pick up where you left off. Don't try to make up for lost time.
Because we're in this for the long haul, not as a project or a test of our iron will and ability to withstand discomfort, but with the goal of making a permanent and sustainable transition, it's extremely important that we associate e-cigarettes with pleasant sensations and feeling good.
We want them to be just as comforting and familiar as our tobacco cigarettes are, and though our memories may be fuzzy, tobacco cigarettes did not become comforting and familiar from one day to the next.
When we first started smoking, it wasn't pleasant. It was work. It hurt. It made us cough. It even made some of us throw up.
Tobacco cigarettes only became comforting to us once we got past that and could inhale the smoke comfortably. After that, it took years, decades, of smoking dozens of the things every day before they became an extension of our fingers.
Yes, for some people, it is instant. As previously bleated, that wouldn't be a good idea for us anyway. But at some point, we may begin to feel impatient. Even if we've intellectually accepted that we can't literally throw out our tobacco cigarettes the day we pick up our first electric one, emotionally we may still get annoyed with ourselves because we still want the tobacco ones. We still like them.
On the days when it all goes to hell, if we let them, the same instant magic stories that inspired us before we started can now make us feel discouraged and displeased with ourselves, but we're not going to let them, because that's counter-productive and not even fact-based.
We are neither bad nor weak nor a disappointment or a failure. We're just old sick people who had a bad day or several that We Hope Will Be Better Tomorrow - just like we always had before we ever picked up an e-cigarette.
"Every person is unique" isn't just a tired platitude, it's an established biological fact. It's hard science.
Here's some more hard science: Every time we practice puffing our electric hookah-doodle, we're not smoking a tobacco cigarette.
In the forums, Gel Toy (not his real name) commented to me that every half hour I'm practicing with my electric hookah-doodle means one less tobacco cigarette that day.
That was waay more encouraging than Gel Toy (not his real name) had any idea it would be.
Every half hour I'm practicing with my electric hookah-doodle means several fewer tobacco cigarettes that half hour.
Of course we all want that number of tobacco cigarettes to eventually be 0.
And we want eventually to happen sooner rather than later, and we want the road to eventually to be 100% Those Days-free.
We all have long lists of things we want, from Tuscan villas to the return of our teenaged torsos. (My personal top 3 have always been the powers of teleportation, invisibility, and flight).
Thanks to the existence of e-cigarettes, phasing out tobacco ones has now been moved from the villa and teleportation list to the list of possible and attainable things we want - like seeing some of our closet floor again someday, or learning more about the evolution of dangdut.
Ceasing to inhale the toxins of tobacco cigarettes into our lungs is - at last - something we CAN do.
This is MAJOR cause for rejoicing!
It'll happen when it happens - if we keep working toward it, keep on building those same Pleasant Thing neural pathways for it that we built for our Marlboros and Camels and Gauloises and Puros.
On Those Days when washing your hair or the round trip downstairs to fix coffee and bring it back up, is your Everest, the work of Puffing Practice can be so arduous that nothing is going to keep you at it, or even doing it at all.
When that happens, the single most important thing we can do for ourselves is just roll with it, put our fingers in our ears and refuse to listen to the siren calls of despair and self-sabotage, whether they beckon us dressed up as self-pity, self-trashing, or envelope-pushing.
Training ourselves to go with the flow now, to keep our eyes on that prize even on the days we're not able to reach for it, is our best chance at making this transition a complete and permanent one.
There will be days when it all goes to hell.
Get a stick, fish it out, and return to your regularly scheduled rejoicing.
