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I had decided to give up cigarettes with the prescription drug Chantix. You've read the news stories about Chantix's dazzling array of side effects, and I'm here to tell you about them firsthand. They're not all bad. If there is a universal complaint among people who have kicked the cigarette habit, for instance, it's weight gain. But Chantix has found a way to combat this: by making all food taste like a snack from a cat's litterbox on the tail end of a tequila bender. This taste distortion and nausea is constant, and does not just affect the user's taste of food. It affects the taste of cigarette smoke as well. I personally loved the taste of smoke, just as some enjoy the residual flavor of burning hickory on grilled meat. For me, a Marlboro had an almost chocolaty nuttiness that perfectly complimented a large meal, which is why I would light up immediately after dinner. After a week on Chantix, however, my post-meal cigarette tasted like monkey scrotum.
I had tried to quit many times before, but the pure enjoyment of the habit always drew me back. Chantix did what nothing else could: it made smoking so repulsive that I could not wait to get rid of my cigarettes on my quit date. So on February 20th, 2008, my habit was dropped faster than felony charges leveled against a Kennedy.
Once my smoking stopped, however, the nausea remained. In fact, it actually intensified, unless I ate certain foods. I discovered that I could suck on lemon drops with no adverse effects, so these became a sort of fifth essential food group within my own nutritional pyramid. For some reason I was also able to tolerate spicy foods, so I started binging on Buffalo Wings, Sriracha Chicken Skewers, Pork Chops Basted in Chilpotle Adobo, and all varieties of Beef Slathered in a Habanero-Cilantro Pesto Sauce.
This diet, of course, led to other issues, like gas. Offensively odiferous, pugnaciously potent, prodigiously prolific gas. As I have no sense of smell, this did not affect me personally, but it did begin to transfer my constant nausea and misery to those around me. In the beginning, it wasn't a big deal. At work, I sit in an area of my office that is sparsely populated, so as long as I could keep the volume down to a level that would not shatter glass, I was okay. For a while, I even got away with it at home, thanks to my youngest daughter being only ten months old. As she was still in diapers, she took the blame for a lot of it. So did the dog.
Eventually, my gas started affecting my sleep. The peaceful stillness of night would suddenly be shattered by the noise of a nuclear-powered foghorn. This would be followed by a blast-furnace wave of scorched wind, and a sheet-tsunami capable of lifting a small child off the bed and tossing him, screaming, fifteen feet into the air. Just as the racket died down, an acidic green haze would seep out of the mattress to singe the nose hairs of any living creature within a thirty-foot radius. This never woke me up, but my wife is a light sleeper, with sensitive ears and a superhuman sense of smell. There were only so many olfactory assaults she could endure before she exiled me to the couch.
This led to a serious decline in the more intimate aspects of our marriage. It's hard for a man to project an attractive, romantic vision of himself to his wife after he just set their bedroom quilt on fire. Even the family dog, who looks longingly at goose droppings in our backyard like I look at Steak au Poivre while dining in Paris, was reduced to a convulsive, writhing, dry-heaving heap of fur.
Even with the nausea, taste distortion, and gas, I kept taking Chantix. It still beat lung cancer, and it worked. Even when I wanted to smoke, I knew I would get nothing out of it. (Besides, you have to quit Chantix for a week before you can get any benefit from smoking again.) Soon, I found I was breathing better, had more energy, was developing renewed confidence in my willpower, and had saved enough money to pursue my other vices ... namely, drinking. Then I tragically discovered what Chantix did to my ability to enjoy a good beer.
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