No More Sniffles: Quitting Smoking Gave Him His Health Back

Vikram Seshadri knew that smoking wasn’t good for his health, and he knew that he had been sick a lot in the 12 years since picking up the habit as a teenager. He suffered from frequent colds, flus, and coughs. "I always thought there was a direct connection between getting sick often and smoking as much as I did," confesses Seshadri. But not even his strong suspicions were enough to make him quit.

Seshadri hated cigarettes as a child growing up with a smoking father. "My mother, brother, and I just found it so disgusting," he says. Yet, in 1994 he found himself lighting up his own first cigarette. Soon he was up to more than a pack a day. He tried to quit three times—once using the nicotine patch and the other two times going cold turkey—but it never quite stuck.

Ultimately, it was a bad bout with the flu in the winter of 2007 that put him over the edge. Seshadri, who works with a public relations firm in Los Angeles, smoked right through his illness. But a mere month after the end of the flu, he started getting flu-like symptoms again and decided he had had enough. "I just sat there and thought, 'This is ridiculous.'" He finally put the pieces together: Smoking was literally making him sick.