I began smoking, much to the chagrin of my parents, when I was 16 years old. The summer of 1984. I started for the same reason most teens start smoking - It was cool, man! There was just no way to be cool if you didn't smoke. I began with the same cigs that my friends smoked - Marlboro Reds. Back then, a pack was $1. I smoked about a pack a day at first, so my weekly habit cost me 7 bucks. Obviously I grew up and became smarter, but I still wasn't strong enough to quit. Within a couple of months, I had switched to Salem Lights. (They're "light", so they must be healthier, right? Pah!)
Over the next three decades I gradually increased my daily intake to about one-and-a-half packs, then to two. I'm 46 now. 30 years of my life I've given to the Tobacco Devil. Averaging about 30 cigarettes per day for 30 years, that's 328,500 cigs. 16,425 packs. Over the years, the cost went up as well, just as it has for everyone. A pack of Salem Lights where I live now costs about $5. Cheap compared to many places in the world. (I live in the sticks - rural central Georgia.) So figure an average of $3.50 over the 30 year span, and I've spent some $57,487.50. Geez! That was a year's salary when I was in my mid twenties. Over 50 grand that I'll never get back again.
The one thing I'm grateful for over all this time is that, at least to my knowledge, I haven't yet suffered any major health issues from smoking. I've never coughed particularly much. Never had chest pains. I do give out of breath after only a couple of minutes when I'm doing something strenuous, but then again, when I was a kid I had surprisingly short physical endurance too, so I don't know how much of that I can rightly attribute to smoking. I'm sure it has caused some of it, though. It surely hasn't helped.
Then, around Christmas last year, I decided to heed the advice of Stephen Dorff and Jenny McCarthy, whose ads were on TV every day, and buy a Blu e-cig starter kit. When I started using it, I had a very positive attitude. I really wanted it to work for me. And mind over matter being what it is, it did for a little while.
It helped that I'm a tech geek and a gadget junkie, too. I've worked in corporate IT for most of my career, and now I build gaming PCs for a living. When I can, that is. I've been disabled as a result of cervical radiculopathy in my neck - vertebral discs C5/C6 and C6/C7. Before I finally had surgery in Nov 2006 and another in Feb 2007, the condition had damaged the nerve cluster that transits from my spinal cord through my left shoulder and down my left arm. I have continual nerve pain - it feels like shooting electrical shocks every few seconds, with a constant soreness and partial numbness, spiking and tingling from my shoulder all the way to the fingers on my left hand. According to four doctors (three neurosurgeons and one GP), this wasn't caused or significantly aggravated by smoking. So I really can't blame smoking for it. It's just something that happened to me recently.
Anyway, back to the Blus... After several days, I realized I was pulling really hard on them and no longer getting the hit I wanted. Blu uses no PG in their e-liquids, so that explains the lack of a throat hit. And they're so small - they're really the same size as analogs, rather than the oversized form factor of the Halo G6 and most others. Being so small, the batteries held very little charge, and the cartos ran out quickly. LONG before the 200 puffs or so that they advertise. I did like the charging case, though. I found it a bit bulky, but it did it's job quite well.
But no matter how nice the case is, I just wasn't going to quit smoking with Blus. I was back on analogs, and on the hunt for a new e-cig solution. I read and read reviews on the 'net, coming across this place more than a few times, in fact. Gleaning all that I had learned, I decided Halo would be a good next step. And boy, was I right! I ordered the G6 starter kit. Much cheaper than the Blu kit (and most of the others I looked at, in fact). The difference in quality compared with the Blu e-cigs was like night and day.
"Wow! So THIS is what they mean when they say 'throat hit'!" And HUGE vapor. And the cartos and batteries lasted considerably longer than the Blus did. I started on the Halo kit vaping 24mg/mL nicotine at a rate of about 1mL - one carto's worth - per day. I bought their menthol variety pack at the same time I ordered the G6 kit. Most of the flavors I liked very much. "Wow! I didn't know e-cigs could taste so good!" In fact, I'm still using a mix of Menthol ICE and SubZero which I refer to as "Freezing Rain" on my bottle labels. (I've described it several times on ECF.) Such a great vape, it is!
Eventually, invention being the mother of necessity and all (
), I wanted more hit and vapor than even the G6 could give me. So I Tritoned up! And that brings us to now. I'm Tritoning some Freezing Rain as I write this.
And in the whirlwind of time since I began my (still new) vaping career, I realized that I hadn't smoked an analog since the day I got my G6 starter kit. January 16th, 2014. After vaping it for several hours through the afternoon on that first day, I was curious to compare, so I lit up one more analog. NASTY! YUCKY! How did I ever smoke these vile things?!?
And that, as they say ........ was that.
