Hi. I'm new to the forum, and to vaping. This is my first post, though I've read a lot of posts here over the last few days. I wrote a post last night with a number of question in it, but when I went to post it my login session had expires, and I was unable to recover it. Maybe just as well- I asked a few questions in it, and it was pretty long (if brevity is the soul of wit, I am definitely not a very witty guy, I'm afraid.) Maybe it would be better to ask them in a couple of different threads, or at least a couple of different posts in this thread.
I've been a smoker for 28 years, since I was 12. I've quit a number of times, but never for longer than six months. Quitting really, really sucks, but I can grit my teeth and do it. I've quit cold-turkey, and with the patch, which helped a little bit, but not enough to make the experience even tolerable, really. My problem is that I tend to relapse (well, "tend" is maybe too weak a word) and when I do the unpleasantness of quitting is still fresh enough in my mind that I can't face it again very soon.
My mother died of lung cancer this summer (my grandmother also died of lung cancer, about 25 years ago.) She had quit smoking, about 14 years ago, but it caught up with her in the end. The whole thing was very fast. She lived only about 10 weeks after being diagnosed, which might have been for the best. For the last few weeks of her life she stayed at my sister's house and received hospice care (and I have nothing but praise for the hospice nurses- they were great, and if you're ever looking for a good charity to donate to I'd recommend considering your local hospice organization.) I was there for the last week. I've never had any doubt that lung cancer was a bad way to die, but there is something about seeing it up close that really brings that home. I've been smoking for quite a while, and it might be that even if I stop now it will catch up to me eventually. But if I stop now the odds will be a lot better, at least.
I quit for two months last Summer/Fall, but wound up starting again after hanging out drinking beer with the guys who live in the front apartment of my building. I couldn't face going through quitting again right away, but I was planning on trying again sometime early this year. I talked to a bus driver one day a couple of weeks ago who has largely switched to using a PV, and he told me where I could buy disposables. I bought a few of them- they were really disgusting, and very expensive, but I figured there must be something better out there, so I was just using them to get an idea of how much they would help. I stayed up late drinking beer last Friday night and smoked all my cigarettes. On Saturday I decided to start off with the disposables and see how long I could go without going to the store to get a pack of cigarettes. And I wound up not smoking all day.
Now, I have quit before, at least six times (I think it is Mark Twain who said "Quitting smoking is easy- I've done it a thousand times"
.) And usually I am just climbing the walls for the first few weeks. The first day isn't actually usually the worst, but it's pretty bad. And the thing is- I was uncomfortable. The disposables were not entirely doing the job. But uncomfortable versus going out of my mind is a big difference. Uncomfortable I can deal with. And the thing that struck me was that this seemed like it might be a solution to the problem of falling off the wagon. If I were to start smoking again, but I had something that allowed me to be just uncomfortable when stopping again... well, I think that might help a lot.
So, in my enthusiasm, I went out on the web and ordered a kit and a pass-through from V2, without doing a lot of research. This is unlike me- I am pretty methodical about things, usually, and my work involves doing a lot of research before making judgments about what to do. I also come from an old Scots family that knows the value of a dollar. Anyway, after ordering from V2 I kept reading, and I realized pretty quickly that I had probably made a mistake, though I didn't fully realize that until after I had been informed by V2 that my order had shipped. Anyway, I didn't want to buy an entire different kit, but I knew that I didn't want to judge vaping based just on the V2 stuff, so I also ordered an eGo pass-through battery kit from cignot.com, along with a box of Boge 2 ohm cartomizers and a few liquids. The order was large enough to ship free, so I sprang for the priority mail upgrade (at $3.00 a pretty good deal.)
Both V2 and cignot shipped very quickly, so I got both packages on Wednesday. I haven't opened the V2 package, but I have been using the eGo passthrough (cignot sent me an eGo-T rather than the plain eGo I ordered- I am guessing they are out of the eGo and upgraded me for free, which is nice.) I had a bit of a disaster on Thursday night when I left the USB charging cable at my office- I have a hellish commute, so I only go to the office Tue-Wed, and work from home on Monday and Friday. I don't drive, and live in a place where that is not very convenient, so I wound up spending about 5 hours today going out and getting a universal USB adapter kit for $15.00, which is quite a lot more than the cable would have cost, but... oh, well. As a result I am not yet off of cigarettes entirely, but I am hopeful. I had 15 cigarettes in my pack when I got the eGo pass-through at 11 AM on Wednesday, and I still had five left at 7:00 PM on Thursday. I would normally go through two to three packs in that time, so that's a pretty big deal for me. The only reason I smoked as much as I did on Wed-Thu is because I was still figuring things out, and it was inconvenient for me to fiddle with the equipment while commuting.
Forgetting the cable made me realize that I am going to want to set myself up so that I can always vape, short of a prolonged power-outage. I am not rolling in money at the moment- I missed a lot of work this year, first because of my mother's illness, and then because I was really pretty down for a long time after that. I'm lucky enough to work for a company that lets me be fairly flexible about how much I work... but the downside to that is that I don't get paid for not working
. I wouldn't mind having something like an 808 around as a backup, and as something small and convenient to carry around at times, but at this point I am pretty sold on using a larger battery most of the time. And the V2 stuff seems a bit overpriced for what it is, though I have heard that it is at least well made. I did get 25 cartomizers with my order, and if I returned it I would wind up having paid shipping both ways with nothing to show for it, but when I look at what a Riva kit costs, or what a Volt kit costs... well, I am considering just returning the whole V2 order. Wondering if anyone who has used V2, or has a better grasp of the economics of all of this has any thoughts.
I have a number of other questions, but this post is already very long. If you've read the whole thing, thanks for making it this far.
Best
T
I've been a smoker for 28 years, since I was 12. I've quit a number of times, but never for longer than six months. Quitting really, really sucks, but I can grit my teeth and do it. I've quit cold-turkey, and with the patch, which helped a little bit, but not enough to make the experience even tolerable, really. My problem is that I tend to relapse (well, "tend" is maybe too weak a word) and when I do the unpleasantness of quitting is still fresh enough in my mind that I can't face it again very soon.
My mother died of lung cancer this summer (my grandmother also died of lung cancer, about 25 years ago.) She had quit smoking, about 14 years ago, but it caught up with her in the end. The whole thing was very fast. She lived only about 10 weeks after being diagnosed, which might have been for the best. For the last few weeks of her life she stayed at my sister's house and received hospice care (and I have nothing but praise for the hospice nurses- they were great, and if you're ever looking for a good charity to donate to I'd recommend considering your local hospice organization.) I was there for the last week. I've never had any doubt that lung cancer was a bad way to die, but there is something about seeing it up close that really brings that home. I've been smoking for quite a while, and it might be that even if I stop now it will catch up to me eventually. But if I stop now the odds will be a lot better, at least.
I quit for two months last Summer/Fall, but wound up starting again after hanging out drinking beer with the guys who live in the front apartment of my building. I couldn't face going through quitting again right away, but I was planning on trying again sometime early this year. I talked to a bus driver one day a couple of weeks ago who has largely switched to using a PV, and he told me where I could buy disposables. I bought a few of them- they were really disgusting, and very expensive, but I figured there must be something better out there, so I was just using them to get an idea of how much they would help. I stayed up late drinking beer last Friday night and smoked all my cigarettes. On Saturday I decided to start off with the disposables and see how long I could go without going to the store to get a pack of cigarettes. And I wound up not smoking all day.
Now, I have quit before, at least six times (I think it is Mark Twain who said "Quitting smoking is easy- I've done it a thousand times"
So, in my enthusiasm, I went out on the web and ordered a kit and a pass-through from V2, without doing a lot of research. This is unlike me- I am pretty methodical about things, usually, and my work involves doing a lot of research before making judgments about what to do. I also come from an old Scots family that knows the value of a dollar. Anyway, after ordering from V2 I kept reading, and I realized pretty quickly that I had probably made a mistake, though I didn't fully realize that until after I had been informed by V2 that my order had shipped. Anyway, I didn't want to buy an entire different kit, but I knew that I didn't want to judge vaping based just on the V2 stuff, so I also ordered an eGo pass-through battery kit from cignot.com, along with a box of Boge 2 ohm cartomizers and a few liquids. The order was large enough to ship free, so I sprang for the priority mail upgrade (at $3.00 a pretty good deal.)
Both V2 and cignot shipped very quickly, so I got both packages on Wednesday. I haven't opened the V2 package, but I have been using the eGo passthrough (cignot sent me an eGo-T rather than the plain eGo I ordered- I am guessing they are out of the eGo and upgraded me for free, which is nice.) I had a bit of a disaster on Thursday night when I left the USB charging cable at my office- I have a hellish commute, so I only go to the office Tue-Wed, and work from home on Monday and Friday. I don't drive, and live in a place where that is not very convenient, so I wound up spending about 5 hours today going out and getting a universal USB adapter kit for $15.00, which is quite a lot more than the cable would have cost, but... oh, well. As a result I am not yet off of cigarettes entirely, but I am hopeful. I had 15 cigarettes in my pack when I got the eGo pass-through at 11 AM on Wednesday, and I still had five left at 7:00 PM on Thursday. I would normally go through two to three packs in that time, so that's a pretty big deal for me. The only reason I smoked as much as I did on Wed-Thu is because I was still figuring things out, and it was inconvenient for me to fiddle with the equipment while commuting.
Forgetting the cable made me realize that I am going to want to set myself up so that I can always vape, short of a prolonged power-outage. I am not rolling in money at the moment- I missed a lot of work this year, first because of my mother's illness, and then because I was really pretty down for a long time after that. I'm lucky enough to work for a company that lets me be fairly flexible about how much I work... but the downside to that is that I don't get paid for not working
I have a number of other questions, but this post is already very long. If you've read the whole thing, thanks for making it this far.
Best
T