mortality (As defined by MSN Encarta)
mor·tal·i·ty [ mawr tállətee ]
noun
Definition:
1. death rate: the number of deaths that occur at a specific time, in a specific group, or from a specific cause
2. many deaths: great loss of life
3. certainty to die: the condition of being certain to die eventually
4. rate of failure: the rate of failure of something such as businesses or farms
5. human beings: the human race
For me, the quitting process began when I realized my mortality pertaining to the third definition. You see, I have heard doctors give me bad news about a member of my immediate family on several different occasions with some ridiculous statistic usually following it. “The chances of someone having this are 1 in 69,000,000” type stuff. Please don’t worry; by God’s grace, all is well. (Even that defies another statistic!) As I posted once upon a Friday evening, this pushed me to realize that it can happen to me so I set a date after 21 years of being a willing slave to the can. It was getting to point of when not if cancer was going to affect me.
For 73 days I kept the up the fight by book marking a website that had Gruen Von BehrensÂ’ story, another that contained Curtis AnsleyÂ’s story, (thanks to both of those guys for telling their story) and of course
www.killthecan.org. I don’t even remember how I found KTC, I just remember looking at the “What to expect when quitting” pages daily. By the 73rd day I had hit a plateau it seemed. I was sick of quitting, sick and tired of concentrating on not having a dip. Then I found a link on KTC to this forum thing. It sounded like some kind of myspace thing. I gave it shot anyway.
I went into the whole thing very skeptical. What I found in that forum thing was a bunch of other quitters like me. I was very happy to be accepted at this late stage. They were good enough to share their experience and help me through a lot of tough times. A bunch of days later, I have a whole group of friends that I would not have imagined possible.
I want all of the guys and gals on the forum to know that I do consider you friends. Each of you has helped my quit in some way. Thank you to everyone! I value the bonds that have been made on this site and the fact that these bonds are contingent on my staying quit would be enough to keep me quit. Mortality tells me that if I dip again, it can happen to me. But, I donÂ’t do that anymore.
