Heart attack

Unlike the delightful Dolores, I have already quit. Do you want to see my meter?

One week, one day, 9 hours, 33 minutes and 8 seconds. 251 cigarettes not smoked, saving £69.28. Life saved: 20 hours, 55 minutes.

The money is amazing. Nearly seventy quid. Not that this is an amazing revelation that will forever keep me away from the fags. The money is also nothing. Think how much I've spent on fags over the last 25 years, and the 70 quid I've already saved is a puddle of piss in a thunderstorm. Still, it is amazing in and of itself, and will enable me to feel okay about buying books and CDs and DVDs and stuff. Not that I ever felt bad about those things. All right, let's just face it - the money I'm saving is absolutely no incentive at all.

Yesterday, I got on Brenda. (Brenda is my unimaginative name for Brenda DyGraf's Lateral Thigh Trainer. Yes, yes I bought one. I used to fall asleep to Brenda's Infomercials, and eventually came to believe that, yes, there is something unique in its skating-like motion.) I did a hundred steps - a hundred at a time is a sensible strategy for somebody who smoked thirty a day and has done little exercise - and then sat down to continue what I was doing. But then, my arm hurt. Not a lot. Just a bit. Lord, I thought, here comes the heart attack. And then I did feel short of breath, and a bit dizzy. Forty minutes later, I was still having a heart attack. My chest even hurt a bit. An hour and a half later, I was still having a heart attack.

I had decided, somewhere around the thirty minute mark, that I wasn't actually having a heart attack, but a mild panic attack, and didn't phone for the paramedics. Even writing this appears to be causing a mild heart attack again. Well, typing is exhausting.

Anyway, here's the point. Somewhere during the internal dialogue over whether I was actually having a heart attack or just being as neurotic as I normally am I decided to open another line of enquiry that went along the lines of wouldn't I actually feel better about all this if I had a fag?

Good news. I didn't. Hence the metero intacto.