Day 5...

Spent the day today watching football and cleaning house. I believe that I am officially beaten in my fantasy football league. My only remaining chance is LT scoring 80 points. While possible, it would be completely improbable. I assume that he would have to score about 8 touchdowns and have most of them as a receiver. So I think I'll officially concede.

For those who are keeping track, I have made it 5 days on the non-smoking program. I ran out of Nicoderm patches today, so I am in the process of figuring out how many to buy with some of my remaining FSA dollars. They come in a variety of strengths to help wean you off of the nicotine. They call them stages. I'm currently in stage one. There are a total of three stages. Each stage drops your nicotine down by about half.

I think that I will probably need the full strength for about 8 weeks. Then about 8 weeks of stage 2 and 3 as well. That puts me on the patch for about 6 months. The cost for the first 8 weeks is about $200. The next two stages are about the same cost. So the whole program should cost about $600. A little less if I get the Walgreens "knock off" variety. I'm sure it has a cute name like Wall-oderm or something.

I'm thinking about throwing in a pack of commit lozenges as well. They are the low dose nicotine lozenge for those "I gotta have a smoke NOW!" moments. Although I haven't had any of those moments yet, I suspect that there will be one, and I would like to have something at my disposal to fend off any stray cravings. They run about $50 for 100ish lozenges.

So anyone who has told me that quitting smoking will save me money is clearly wrong. By the end of the day I will have spent nearly a thousand dollars on quit smoking related products and treatments. At this point I haven't even filled the Zyban prescription from my doctor, so I assume that the cost will continue to rise. Thankfully I have a huge unspent FSA account of all 2007 dollars that is carrying the weight. I couldn't afford to quit if this was all out of pocket expense.

Just kidding... this is not about the money.

- ND