How Pokémon Go Is Helping My Mom Quit Smoking
On any given night I would wake up and hear a sound through the floor that made my stomach drop like a falling building. It was a violent wheezing and hacking. My mom was downstairs coughing up her lungs, and it turned my blood to slush every time.
That sound is painted like lines on a highway across every synapse in my brain. It conjured the fear that she might have been stricken by cancer. My dad lost his second battle with that cursed disease just over a year ago, so its shadow has been looming especially large since then.
My mom is 52 years old. Since the age of 13 she has smoked. How many cigarettes a day fluctuated, but around a pack, for as long as I can remember, is my rough estimate.
Almost one year to the day that my dad passed away, she woke up in the middle of the night hacking and coughing again. That was nothing unusual. She couldn’t catch her breath, though. That never happened before. She lay in bed, in a cold sweat, gasping for breath.
She always used to confess, with tears in her eyes, that she was terrified to see a doctor because she didn’t want them to tell her the bad news. She didn’t know for sure that something was wrong, but she felt it, and preferred blissful ignorance to hearing a diagnosis of that dreaded six letter word. It didn’t matter that, logically, they might not have any bad news for her at all. To her, there was still a chance they would have bad news. It didn’t matter, logically, that if they diagnosed her, they could start a course of treatment to give her better odds of survival. To her, it might be too late. I argued with her to see a doctor so many times. Terror paralyzed her.
That night in September was too much. The raw panic brought on by sucking in panicked breaths of air to little avail pushed her to finally seek medical attention. She is fine. Thank goodness, she is just fine. Her physician found nothing abnormal, at least for a lifelong smoker, with her lungs.
A raw sense of dread from waking in the middle of the night unable to breathe lingered. That was the breaking point that not only finally pushed her to see a doctor, but she also quit smoking immediately. My family pleaded, begged, and argued with her constantly to quit, but she needed to do so at her own pace. Over the past year she tapered down to only a handful of cigarettes a day, but plateaued for months. This was her time to quit. She went cold turkey.
She has had some help. I don’t just mean the moral support of friends and family, or the medical advice of her doctor, or wisdom and encouragement from the support group she joined on Facebook. Something else has eased her transition into recovery: Pokémon Go.
It’s curious. She never really played games. She was always supportive of my hobby. Some of my warmest and fuzziest memories are of sitting down next to her as a kid and playing Mega Man X as she just watched and talked to me about the game, or having her occasionally indulge me by doing a co-op run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time. Yes, she got into Candy Crush for a bit and loves to sit at her laptop playing slot machine games, but for the most part, video games have not been a big part of her life.
She was tangentially aware that a game called Pokémon existed. I know because I was deep in that hole. I watched the anime, played Red and Blue like a fiend, and played the card game. I even evangelized the card game to everyone in my neighborhood who would listen. She was aware of Pokémon because I constantly tugged on her shirt in KB asking for booster packs, and got her to drive me to TCG tournaments at Toys ’R’ Us. Aside from that, she knew nothing about the actual content of the game. She did not know a Pikachu from a Mewtwo, and Pokémon Go missed her when it was initially a staple of the cultural zeitgeist. Yet Pokémon Go, long after its popularity peaked, is a comfort to her.
Long-time smokers will tell you, sometimes right after a drag, that they weren’t even craving that insidious stick of death at that moment. It was just there and lighting it up and taking a puff is just something their hands learned to do from habit. When they quit, they often need to pick up a new hands-on hobby to occupy their busy digits. For my mom, that is Pokémon Go.
So now, instead of going out onto the porch and taking a few drags, she goes out and blows through her day’s supply of pokeballs trying to capture that stubborn Ghastly who hangs out in her front yard. On her commute to and from work, she doesn’t stop in the gas station to buy a pack. Instead, she swings by the pokestops at a nearby park and a nearby church to restock because Ghastly keeps getting away. She walks around and hatches eggs, and when she stops it isn’t for a cigarette break, it’s to catch something new she has discovered.
The lows of withdrawal are absolutely dismal. I cannot speak from experience, but I have watched her suffer, and my heart broke for her during those initial few weeks when it was kicking her butt the hardest. I have seen her erratic mood swings. I have seen her suffer from anxiety spikes that threatened to combust into panic attacks. I have seen her spontaneously burst into tears. These are normal symptoms of withdrawal, but all the while she swore up and down that something must be wrong with her, because she didn’t believe it could be normal to go through something so harsh.
It’s comforting, though, to know that something that brought me so much joy as a kid is helping her, however slightly, through this whole challenge.
My mom has not smoked at all in three months. This is one in a long list of accomplishments I am eternally proud of her for. My whole family is. Whether or not we express that as often as we should — I know I am guilty of not doing so — we are absolutely beaming at her strength, and we are collectively relieved.
I love you, mom.
David O’Keefe is a freelance writer whose work has been featured on Variety, Red Bull, Unwinnable, PC Gamer, The Esports Observer, Game Daily, and many more fine purveyors of internet words. He also likes esports, photography, oxford commas, and waxing nostalgic about how Warcraft 3 is the greatest game ever made. Follow him on Twitter @DaveScribbles.
How Pokémon Go Is Helping My Mom Quit Smoking
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