Hi everyone.
My name is Patrick and I just quit chewing tobacco for good as of yesterday, October 13 @ 9pm. I'm 23 years old and have been chewing for *exactly* five years as of yesterday. I left the service a year ago and figured that this deadly habit would kind of slowly disappear because civilians don't chew tobacco --- or so I thought. This is my third attempt at quitting. The very first time I quit tobacco one of my friends was killed about 7 days into the quit. The second time, unfortunately I made it 4 days and the same circumstances occurred.
This is my first day without chewing tobacco and I work from home. Thankfully, my company has a brand new empty office with wifi in it that I'm locking myself in right now. I believe if my loving wife tried to baby me even a single time about my cravings I'd probably blow my lid. So far I have found that I can't read worth a damn and I'm sweating balls right now. The only thing that has helped (oddly enough) is rinsing my mouth out with that brown bottle of bubbly water that kids put on their cuts (I really can't focus right now).
Has anyone else experienced a weird dull ache in their jaw ? It feels kind of like if you were to bite down on something as hard as you can and your jaw gets sore from it. Bite down on a shirt or something and let me know if you had that feeling when you quit.
The reason I'm quitting is because while I was driving down the road one day I felt a bubble on the inside of my cheek, kind of where the dead skin is from me chewing on it all the time.As I put my tongue on it I realized that it was a perfect circle and felt really weird. So I bit it and next thing you know, blood came out of it. It didn't hurt before or after popping it, yet it looked like a blood blister. It healed and hasn't returned, but fast forward a couple of weeks and now I have a sore of some sort on a bottom molar in the back left of my mouth that hurts pretty bad. I'm tired of having tobacco in my teeth, my teeth turning yellow and thinking that I'm dying every time something odd pops up in my mouth. I don't believe I have been dipping long enough to have developed anything cancerous. My Grand father (dad side) smoked for 30 years, my father chewed for 8, my mother still smokes and is going on 35 years of it. Grand father/mother (mother side) have smoked for 45 years. The only cancer in my family has been skin cancer and I would like to not be the first occurrence of it. Sorry for the long intro, this is what is keeping me from buying a tin right now.