My efforts to quit vaping came to the do-or-die phase at a pretty bad time. Basically, right when Clancy was resigning. That was leaving me in a pretty bad place because it was high-stress and I had no coping mechanism. It wasn’t through sheer grit that I didn’t turn to vaping, but rather where I was in the Welbutrin cycle. Long story short, I could vape all I wanted, but my nicotine receptors were scrambled and it wouldn’t do any good. I still vaped, but the whole puffing-to-no-effect was causing its own anxiety. So I basically had to make the decision whether to stop taking the Welbutrin or stop vaping. I just couldn’t keep doing both.

I decided to stop vaping. The first thing I did was order a Nintendo Wii U. Back before I smoked, playing basketball outside was the way that I found my zen and organized my thoughts. Due to the peculiarities of the house, I couldn’t set up a hoop here. Nor was there space for my backup plan, a pool table. But I had been circling the Wii for a while because it has some indoor activity stuff that could serve the same purpose.

Until I started taking it again, I’d forgotten one of the primary effects of Welburtin is that it reduces the need for sleep. I need about six hours a night usually and Welbutrin makes it so that I have trouble even getting that much. It’s an effect that subsides with time, but it takes a while. In this case, it leaves me with ever-more time to be awake and not vaping. At a time when I desperately want time to pass to that I can get over the hump, there are suddenly more hours in the day.

It was, it turned out, remarkably successful. Instead of vaping, I’d play one of the games from the Sports Resort package. I ended up doing a lot of it, in fact. So much so that with each progressive day, my muscles were more and more tired. Not in a bad way, though! I could just feel it. On the fourth day, the Wii Fit package arrived. For those who don’t know, the Wii Fit is the exercise program. It’s more physically intensive than sports.

I got the fit to help distract me from the vaping. Which it did. Just not at all in the way that I had imagined.

I had been playing Wii Fit for about 90 minutes when I jerked my back something fierce. It wasn’t too bad at first, but it kept getting worse. And worse. And worse.

When your back hurts, your body generally compensates by using other muscles. Which is all very well and good… unless all of your other muscles are three days into utter exhaustion. Then your legs and arms simply don’t have the energy to compensate. It then throws more burden to the back, which then spasms. And round and round it goes.

The second day was pure agony. I cannot remember the last time I felt so much pain. Clancy could not remember ever seeing me in that much pain. I was in a place where I was slouched on the sofa and I literally could not move enough to either sit up on it or lay down on it. Clancy tried to move my legs for me and that was even worse. And with each spasm, the muscles would tighten more, which lead to more spasms and more muscle tightening in a really vicious cycle.

Among the few things that helped was showering. So once I was able to get up and move around – which did happen eventually – I went into the shower. Clancy literally had to help me get dressed afterwards.

Now, the Himmelreich-Truman household is actually a drug den. Clancy gets medications for various things and she fills them whether she has to use them or not. The same is true of me. The Welbutrin I’d been taken was prescribed in 2010. So when something like this happens, we have options. This was especially true since the medicine cabinet was thrown at her when she busted her kneecap. She asked if I wanted to take some muscle relaxers. I asked if they were addictive and she replied that they weren’t but that she never took them because they made her feel loopy and dull.

I said that I wanted all of the muscle relaxers in the universe.

I came close to actually taking the Vicodin, which is addictive. I was in that much pain. It didn’t quite reach that point. Things did gradually start getting better, slowly. It was two steps forward and one step back. I put myself and my daughter at risk trying to drive her to preschool when my back was not in good enough shape that I could sit freely in the car seat (I basically used one of my two arms to prop me up). That was a step back. But showering twice a day and taking the drugs would represent a couple steps forward.

It’s been almost a week now since that happened. The nice Wii that I bought has barely seen any use as new games that I ordered before the injury started arriving. The biggest lag has really been that I have nowhere to distribute the weight, too. My arms are better, but my legs are still really sore. My back is almost better, though the legs keep pushing weight in that direction. The biggest bullet dodged was that throughout this entire thing, I never needed to use the can for serious business. That felt like a ticking timebomb about to go off because pushing excrement through requires pushing some of the same muscles that were spasming. Somehow – probably related to the diet – I went four days or so without needing to go.

I eventually had to stop taking the Welbutrin because I wanted to keep waking hours to as much of a minimum as I could. And vaping wasn’t really on my mind. Which turned out to be a real upshot because the big thing that I was trying not to do was really kept out of a mind that was crowded with physical pain and preoccupation.It has really only started to hit me the last couple of days that I have been well enough to go back to it (but not wanting to). At this point, it’s a longer trip to go back and restart the habit than it is to plow forward.

One last side effect of all of this is that it has forced Lain into greater independence. As a matter of routine, I carry her to the car and from the car into the church for preschool. But since I couldn’t, I forced her to walk. She, in turn, has taken to asserting her independence more and more. When Clancy busted her kneecap, Lain was really quite scared of her. She’s a little bit older now, though, and seems to have adapted to my malady well. She was even fetching my cane while I was needing it.

As things presently stand, my back is in pretty good shape but my legs are as sore as they’ve been in a long time.

So, none of this has gone as I had planned, but it does seem to have gotten me over the hump. It has even helped with the diet as going to the kitchen and getting something to eat was suddenly an ordeal. My calorie intake dropped from 1800 to 1500 or so and I was in too much pain to be hungry.

There is no grand lesson here, other than that if you have an MD wife telling you to take it easy with the active video games, you should probably listen to her.

Unless you’re desperate to kick a habit.