It was easy for me to quit. My boyfriend at the time and I were on a trip in Wyoming. One morning he couldn't stop looking at his tongue in the rear view mirror of the van. He had a sore spot that wouldn't go away.
Fast forward to the end of our 3 week trip. I convinced him to go to a doctor and it turned out he had tongue cancer from smoking. Right where he used to always hold the cig in his mouth to take a drag. They removed a piece of his tongue the size of a quarter and gave him 3 months of radiation therapy that made everything taste like alluminum foil and made him talk like he was retarded.
Fast forward again 8 months. All of the sudden he had a big sore bump on his neck. Turned out to be more cancer. Here's him after the surgery:
Had his jugular and that whole muscle on the side of your neck removed along with all his lymph nodes. After that, more radiation and this time 6 months of chemo where he barfed for hours and hours until he would beg me to give him some water to drink so he'd have something to throw up instead of dry heaving.
A year after that, his left lung removed. Scar from the middle of his chest around to the middle of his back. He couldn't walk a quarter mile without being winded. No more surfing. No more windsurfing. No more playing with his teen aged sons the way he used to. No camping. No hiking and really limited on his fishing.
More fast forward. October 1993... he was sitting in the car on the way to the doctors and he shifted in the front seat. There was a loud crack and he was screaming. He shattered his cancer ridden pelvis. A few weeks later he didn't know who I was as the cancer was in his spine, pelvis and brain.
I never had another urge to smoke.