Making his break from cigarettes

This is where Bill Temple got his start, right here on what remains of a smelter on the banks of Lake Pend Oreille in Sandpoint. It is beautiful here on this lakeside overlook, framed by mountains all around and blue sky above.

“This was my playground when I was a kid,” says Temple, now 64.

It’s where he used to sit and watch the water lap the shore. It’s where he and his friends found timbers and scraps to lash together into rafts to float on all summer.

And it’s also where he smoked his first cigarettes, the first of roughly 350,400 smokes he would light up during his 48-year-long, pack-a-day habit.

“I don’t think I should inhale this,” he remembers thinking when that first cigarette touched his lips. But he did inhale, and he found it wasn’t so bad. In fact, he liked it. And he was hooked.

Temple’s story is like that of so many longtime smokers. He may have spent 48 years lighting up, but he spent half that long trying to quit, which is not at all unusual, smoking-cessation experts say.

About 70 percent of the more than 45 million adult smokers in this country say they want to quit, according to 2003 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A little more than 40 percent of those smokers said they attempted to quit for at least one day in 2003.

It takes smokers an average of eight tries before kicking the habit for good, says Cheryl McDonald, the Spokane-based senior tobacco control coordinator for the American Lung Association of Washington.

“Nicotine is the most addictive drug out there,” McDonald says. “This is a huge addiction. Not only is it a drug addiction, it’s a habit addiction as well.”

Each time a smoker tries to quit, though, and does not succeed, it feels like a failure, she says.

“No, you haven’t failed,” she says. “You’ve learned more about yourself as a smoker. There are social smokers and emotional smokers and habit smokers.”

Temple would quit and then fall off the wagon. Then it would take him another couple of years to get past the feelings of failure and muster the courage to try again. But the drive to smoke becomes all-consuming, he says.

“It’s pretty intense,” he says. “All you think about is a cigarette. You just want a cigarette.

“It gets very tiring thinking about cigarettes all the time. Finally I would just give in and have a cigarette.”

Once, Temple made it three or four months without lighting up. He thought he was cured. One cigarette wouldn’t hurt, he figured.

Big mistake.

Over the years, he tried nicotine gum and patches. He gobbled licorice by the bagful and seared his mouth with atomic fireball candies. He popped herbal remedies and punched holes in his cigarettes so he wouldn’t absorb as much nicotine.

“I tried them all,” says Temple, who owned a Sandpoint used bookstore for 18 years before selling it a few years back.

Finally, three years ago this month, the pieces clicked. Temple got tired of trying to quit and decided he would be done with cigarettes for good.

“I knew I’d never smoke again,” he says.

He’s not sure what contributed to his resolve. But whatever it was, it worked.

Unfortunately for Temple, the damage of nearly a half century of smoking had already been done.

Not 30 days after quitting, he had a heart attack.

Temple, who has driven a bus for the Bonner County Schools for 13 years, was fueling the school bus that day when he started to feel tightness in his chest and throat. He decided he needed to finish cleaning out the bus, but he couldn’t do it.

He drove a few miles home, lay down on the floor and told his wife to call 911.

Doctors couldn’t seem to stop his searing chest pain. One told him, “You may die right here,” he says.

Electric shocks finally got his heart back in rhythm and he was airlifted to Deaconess Medical Center. Surgeons put in a stent to prop open his clogged artery.

He’s now on cholesterol-lowering drugs and has dropped 20 pounds, though he’d like to lose more. He has replaced his cigarette addiction with a passion for exercise, a major accomplishment for a guy who not long ago would only begrudgingly take a walk with his wife.

Now, Temple exercises about 90 minutes a day, usually in the form of a five-mile walk on trails around Sandpoint or on his treadmill. And he logs about 10 miles a day on his bike, he says, going to work, to the coffee shop and the post office and other errands.

“I have a lot more stamina,” he says. “I just feel better. I feel like doing things. I don’t mind mowing the lawn now.”

Being in good shape will likely help Temple as he battles his next challenge. Just a few weeks ago, doctors discovered he had prostate cancer, a disease that killed his father 35 years ago.

Temple is scheduled for surgery early next month.

Initial tests show that he’s on the “high end of low risk and the low end of high risk,” he says, but he won’t know for sure until the operation’s complete.

Temple still has fleeting moments, he says, when he thinks about lighting up a cigarette – while drinking a cup of coffee or enjoying a view of the lake. But he never gives in.

He hopes other smokers will realize that even an unsuccessful attempt at quitting is not a failure.

“Keep trying,” he says. “Keep trying.

“Don’t give up trying. Just don’t give up.”