ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, October 26, 1996 TAG: 9610280068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SERIES: Occassional
SOURCE: DONNA ABU-NASR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
AMID COURT and campaign battles over smoking, the private struggle to stop is often overlooked.
It was 6:30 on the evening of Sept. 24, and on a chilly concrete patio outside a hospital, Lauretta Bambula took the last drag on her last cigarette.
``I hated to part with it. I puffed on it to the very end, to the cork. Even then, I still didn't think I was going to quit,'' Bambula said a month later, drawing on the cinnamon stick that has replaced the cigarette always dangling from her fingers.
Yet since that night, despite her misgivings, the 67-year-old smoker of 43 years has managed to resist - an undertaking she called the ``hardest thing I've ever done in my life.''
Like almost all smokers who have decided to quit, Bambula knows her journey won't be easy. She has been there twice before - in 1982 and 1986 - and failed. A whiff of smoke broke down her resolve in both cases.
But this time, she is determined to succeed.
``I keep telling myself smoking is no longer a part of my life. It's not an option to cope with stress any more,'' she said.
It was a friend's remark that pushed Bambula to enroll this fall in a smoking cessation class offered by the American Lung Association at Sibley Hospital in Washington.
She had been coughing up blood since January. In May, doctors found a lump in her left lung. Although the lump was diagnosed as benign in August, doctors are still watching it.
Even that was not enough to make her quit.
``Then one day my friend said, `Maybe your smoking is aggravating what's in your lung.' That made sense to me,'' Bambula said.
Yet even as she registered for the class, she remained ambivalent.
``On the questionnaire, which asked if I wanted to quit, I said `I don't know,''' Bambula said with a throaty laugh.
During the program's first three weeks, the group of 13 smokers was simply encouraged to cut back on cigarettes and learn how to deal with triggers. Bambula was negative and very withdrawn, said class leader Linda Schwarz.
``I frankly didn't think she'd be successful,'' Schwarz said.
Neither did Bambula.
It was mainly peer pressure that made Bambula smoke her first cigarette in Tucson, Ariz., when in her 20s.
``In those days you were considered an idiot if you didn't smoke. I didn't really care for it when I first took it up. I thought it was a waste,'' Bambula said.
Her family - two aunts - didn't help. ``They smoked like stoves.''
Gradually, smoking became Bambula's way of dealing with stress. She became a chain smoker, spending $184 a month.
When smoking was banned at work - she was a legal secretary at the Justice Department until retiring in 1993 - she'd go out several times during her shift to puff hungrily on cigarettes.
``I went out too many times - my boss got mad,'' she said.
Bambula is typical of many who try to quit. The American Lung Association says that in general, people try several times before they succeed. More women try to quit than men, and younger people tend to think they are more in control and try to give up smoking on their own without help from clinics, according to the association.
During her first attempt to give up smoking in 1982, she took up cinnamon sticks. They helped occupy her hands, which had got used to the back and forth movement between the ashtray and her lips.
She also began chewing nicotine gum, which has enough nicotine to reduce the urge to smoke. But both that and the 1986 try failed - after 11 months of no smoking in 1982 and one month in 1986.
During the first three weeks of the ALA course, Bambula took up the stick and the gum again. She paced whenever she felt like smoking.
On the day designated as the group's last smoking day - Sept. 24 - everyone went out to a small smokers' gazebo on the hospital grounds to have a last cigarette. When Schwarz came over with a bag to collect leftovers, Bambula still had half a pack.
``It killed me to throw them away,'' she said later, clutching a coffee mug tightly as she remembered the moment.
Later that night, Bambula had her first urge to smoke. It was triggered by driving home in the dark, which always makes her nervous. Once in her apartment, she watched the news and paced the floor.
Since then, she's had to cope with the same intense cravings hour after hour - when she has breakfast, after her daily swim, when she's waiting for a TV program to start.
She watches talk shows and her favorite soap opera, plays the organ, listens to operas and talks to friends to occupy her mind. She stays away from stores where she previously bought cigarettes.
``But smoking was so much part of my life that I just think of it automatically, even when I'm chewing the gum. I think, `Gee. I should have a cigarette instead of this thing,''' she admitted.
Bambula has told everyone she knows that she's stopped smoking.
``I did that for my protection. If I go back to smoking, I would lose face,'' she said.
Waiters at local coffee shops are surprised when she asks to be seated in the nonsmoking section. And Bambula said even she sometimes forgets she's given up cigarettes.
``One day, I left my cinnamon stick in the living room and went into the kitchen. There I suddenly panicked, thinking I had left the cigarette burning. Then I thought, `You don't smoke. How could you think the cigarette was burning?'''
As she comes down from her initial euphoria and enters ``the long-term, this-is-what's-life-like'' stage, Bambula's enthusiasm will wane, warn psychologists who study such things.
``She may begin to feel a bit cocky and may think, `Well, I can have just one.' One is liable to lead to two, and two are liable to lead to a carton,'' said Edwin Fisher, a professor of psychology and medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.
Bambula is aware of the difficulties ahead.
With almost no family - she has a cousin and an estranged niece - she worries she may be so lonely at Thanksgiving and Christmas she won't be able to resist the urge.
``I will do my best not to pick up a cigarette,'' she said. ``But I'm already nervous about it.''
LENGTH: Long : 121 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The Associated Press interviewed Lauretta Bambula aboutby CNBher first month without cigarettes. In coming months, it will visit
her periodically. color.