Smoke-Free UMKC Provides incentive, help

Note: This first-person story was written by Chris Fasl, a student at UMKC since 2009. He received his a Bachelors in Urban Planning + Design in 2012 and just weeks ago, completed his Masters in Entrepreneurial Real Estate.

It was New Year’s Eve in 2012. I remember smashing the remaining cigarettes in my box and declaring to my friends that I was done. But when I awoke the next morning and everyone lit up their morning smoke; so did I. I knew then I was going to need help quitting; and eventually I found that support at UMKCs Student Health and Wellness Center.

As an uninsured student, I made many visits to the Wellness Center. On one such visit, I learned about a pilot program that UMKC was offering for smoking cessation. Ever since that New Year’s Eve, my internal dialogue was focused on attacking my habit again; so I decided to make an appointment and give it – yes – “the ‘ol college try.”

I met with Kate Melton, Wellness Center health educator, around the beginning of that summer; and she set me up with nicotine patches and offered lots of other resources. Patches can cost upwards of fifty dollars, but UMKC offered free Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) through a grant provided by Partners in Prevention, a coalition of Missouri colleges dedicated to safe, healthy campuses. There was no cost to me – great news for a college student.

It took the entire summer to quit, but by August I wasn’t smoking anymore! It was a rough journey and there were setbacks along the way. I had to rewrite a lot of my behaviors and simply learn to live differently. But the patch helped by removing the cigarette from my daily routine while helping my body to slowly come off of the addiction to nicotine.

That next semester I was proud to announce to my returning classmates that I was no longer a smoker! But six months later at a graduate school competition in Manhattan, I cramped under stress and picked up the habit again. It was too easy, considering around this time I had also just moved in with some friends who were smokers. But I told myself this was only going to last while I was a student. I was not going to graduate as a smoker!

So this past summer I made another appointment and returned to the Wellness Center to make one final push at quitting. I also received some sage advice from finance professor Stephen Pruitt.

Pruitt likes to tell stories – lots of stories. But there are definite gems in his lessons. In one such story, he summed up smoking by comparing it to saving for the future. When you smoke, you receive the positive (nicotine rush) immediately and defer the negative (um, early death…) to the future. So to quit smoking, you have to value the future over the now. And as someone about to graduate with a Master’s degree, I knew I had a positive future ahead of me.

Smoking cessation is obviously the wave of the future. There are fewer and fewer smokers in the United States. Doctors in the United Kingdom have recommended banning the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 2000; and the Australian Medical Association likes the idea. There could be a whole generation of non-smokers coming up behind me.

There is an old Japanese saying, “Nanakorobi yaoki”, “Fall seven times, rise eight times.” This has been my mantra. And as of this writing, I am proud to say I have been smoke free for the past two months. I learned, as all would-be quitters have, that quitting is not easy. It has proven to be a longer process than I expected, but what I do have going for me is persistence. Success for me is wanting to quit and acting toward that desire, just the opposite to giving in to the craving for nicotine.