These are vaping devices. The long red pen on the far right is the oldest, what I puffed on for several years. The center one is a Janty, brushed steel and heavy, and flat. It feels good in my hand, and can hold the most e-juice, but its refillable cartridge burns out quickly, needing replacing every few days.
The smallest one on the far left is a ‘Mini-Fit’, one of the latest devices and a real champ. No bigger than my thumb, it can take endless juice refills, charges in minutes and plumes big clouds of vapor. I had it in 5 colors—red, bronze, black, blue & gold.
They’re all gone now. I quit vaping on July 4, and carted a bag of a dozen or so pens, 3 Jantys, 5 Mini-Fits, refill cartridges, e-pods and a case containing 22 bottles of e-juice (each bottle lasted approximately 3 months, I had enough to keep me vaping for years) downstairs and outside to the dumpster behind my apartment building.
For the first time in 41 years, I am both “smoke and vape free”. I HAD to quit if I want to get over this awful jaw disorder.
This began with cigarettes, in 1979. Both my best friend Dan & my girlfriend Sherri smoked, would always offer me one, and while I never felt pressured, sure why not.
And a week before I graduated high school, I bought my first pack—I was hooked.
I was never proud of the fact I smoked, but I enjoyed them greatly. I’ll never forget one day in 1984, I was working in the Garden Shop at our local Murphy’s Mart, helping a woman load bags of potting soil & peat moss into her trunk. She was fairly new in town, a dentist & avid gardener, and on friendly terms with everyone. She said “Douglas you sure have a beautiful smile.” I said “Aw, thanks Dr. Jane.” She said “I’m surprised you’re a smoker, if you don’t quit you’re going to lose that smile someday.”
She was right, of course. I spent most of the 1990s getting several teeth pulled, and the rest either root-canaled, crowned or both. Half of my upper teeth are bridges, and I wear a partial denture on the lower left. Tobacco will wreck your teeth.
Still, I continued puffing away.
And then one evening in June 2008, I was watching foreign tv commercials on Youtube, and saw a British advert for electronic cigarettes, “for when a real smoke isn’t convenient.” They weren’t even sold in the US yet, so I wrote the manufacturer and asked if I could order a kit. I thought if it seemed real enough, it might help me cut down 1-2 cigs from my pack-a-day habit.
Oh, it worked better than expected. That kit included a couple of black pens (with a tip that glowed orange when you puffed) and a ‘juice sampler’ in different nicotine strengths. 18mg nicotine—12mg—6mg—3mg. I began with the 18mg, but was still frustrated that it wasn’t like smoking at all. You weren’t inhaling a dense, aromatic smoke, it was more like “sipping steam”.
That first night, I tossed it across the room: “Useless.”
But that inhale of steam contained nicotine, so I stuck at it, and began noticing in the days ahead that my urge to smoke REAL cigarettes was diminishing. Instead of running downstairs for a cigarette every 90 minutes at the office, I vaped for a couple minutes at my desk instead. Coworkers asked what it was, and laughed at the silliness of it.
I wasn’t laughing—for the first time in decades, I saw a real possibility of quitting cigarettes altogether.
And on July 4, 2008 I was outside on my balcony smoking my nightly “cigarette before bed” and a voice inside me said: This is your last cigarette. You’ll never smoke again. That voice was right—I never picked up another cigarette.
Going to full-time vaping wasn’t easy. The first few nights I puffed frantically on steam. But eventually I adapted, and happily settled into vaping. As days passed, I coughed up some awful stuff every morning as my lungs cleared themselves of 25+ years of tobacco use; soon my smoker’s cough was gone. Everything smelled & tasted better. My clothes smelled as fresh at the end of the day as they did in the morning.
That e-cig was a godsend! I soon learned I could vape indoors too, the fog it produced was clean of tar or burnt tobacco, and didn’t yellow walls or lampshades, or stink up anything.
Still, I didn’t want to trade one addiction for another. I began vaping those other juices with less nicotine. I switched from 18mg to 12, had a shaky start, but adjusted. In the next several months I went to 6mg nicotine juice, and finally down to the lowest, the 3mg.
I was one happy camper, and told everyone I was vaping the lowest juice available; how difficult can it be to quit now? I’d do it when I was good and ready.
What I’d failed to see, I was vaping more to maintain the same level of nicotine in my body. On that 3mg juice, I pretty much vaped constantly now. It became a worse habit than cigarettes.
I never thought of the workout I was giving my poor jaw muscles day & night… to think I did it for 12 years… I am such a dope.
When I wrote at the top that I quit vaping, it wasn’t by choice; I wound up in the hospital over the 4th of July, and was in there longer than expected. I’m debating sharing the whole story, I’d sooner just forget it.
A nurse found one of my vape pens on me, asked what it was and when I told him, he slapped a nicotine patch on my arm. My vaping days were done.
After my release, I headed straight to my local drugstore and bought a couple boxes of the patches. They’ve taken a little of the edge off, but this has been hard. Everytime my phone rings or I get out of the shower or make a cup of coffee, I reach for a vape pen and—fudge. I take some big breaths of air instead.
I’ve been vape-free 3 weeks as of this writing, but I often feel as anxious as the first day. The nicotine patches (which gradually taper you down) says the emotional need lasts around 6 weeks.
I just hope my swollen masseters will forgive me in time and calm down too.
