I first heard of electronic cigarettes, or ‘e-cigs’, when my wife came home from playing bingo one day. She had been bugging me for a while to try giving up smoking due to her asthma getting worse, (although she smoked too!), and had recently been diagnosed with chronic bronchitis. I had always just nodded and mumbled under my breath, yes babe, we’ll start on it tomorrow. We had both been to see our local practice nurse to start a course of NRT a couple of weeks earlier, but the patches were causing me to have palpitations and to be honest, the cravings for cigarettes were really bad even with the patches on and we were both arguing with each other constantly, and it was really putting a strain on our marriage. Quite a few times we had come to the stage of talking about divorce! The patches obviously weren’t working. Anyway, as i was saying. My wife had been to bingo the one day and had come back all excited talking about this electronic cigarette one of her friends had been using, I want to get one she excitedly told me, she was so excited that the button on this electronic cigarette lit up blue when you pressed it, (my wife loves anything that’s a gadget), she told me she was going to get one at the weekend, so that weekend we went on the hunt for one of these devices, and after a lot of searching we found her one at a local market, although it was a lot more expensive than her friend had told her. We got back home and my wife got everything out of the box and charged this device for a couple of hours, and then after screwing the various components together, and putting some e-liquid into it she began to smoke it, and passed it to me to try, (i thought it was disgusting!), i told her it was ok. After much convincing and coercing, my wife talked me into getting a starter kit for myself, i didn’t really want to give up my roll-ups at the time as i was an ardent smoker of 25+ years and thought anything that was supposed to help you give up smoking was the work of the devil. That following weekend i got myself a starter kit of a double ego kit with 2 batteries and 2 clearomisers with a wall charger, and i got a bottle of tobacco flavoured juice at 24mg strength as that was the strongest they had at the time. I got it home and charged it all up, all the time not really intending to let go of my tobacco habit, and then i started to use the device. At first it was absolutely disgusting! but then after a few ‘drags’ i sort of got used to it. I didn’t exclusively use the e-cig for the first couple of days, i still had a tobacco roll-up now and then, but after a couple of days i found myself not really wanting the roll-ups anymore and i was beginning to enjoy using the e-cig more and more, to such an extent that i stopped using tobacco altogether and just used the e-cig all the time. I really couldn’t believe how easy it was switching from tobacco to the e-cig! All those years of trying to give up smoking and struggling so hard with it, arguing with my wife because of withdrawal symptoms etc, and here i was after just a couple of days, and no more smoking! I couldn’t believe it! I found it so easy. Now, after 5 months of ‘vaping’, i am committed to not smoking anymore. I’ve tried having a tobacco cigarette and it made me feel sick! Not for me thank you. I much prefer my e-cig, it’s a much cleaner and healthier way of getting the nicotine that i need to satisfy the cravings. To be honest, it’s become more of a hobby now, whereas smoking was, at times, a real chore, i just did it for the sake of it, because i needed the fix of nicotine, but i didn’t enjoy it a lot of the time. I don’t get that with vaping. I enjoy vaping 100% of the time, the whole of it. From the actual vaping itself, to filling the atomisers, to choosing what juice to use, to rebuilding wicks and coils, it really is something that has grabbed me. I’ve gone from owning 1 starter kit with 2 batteries, 2 atomisers and a charger, to owning 7 kits of varying battery sizes, variable voltage devices, varying battery strengths, different atomiser types from basic CE4’s with wicks to Kanger Protank’s with bottom-fed coils, and soon to have an itaste mvp with variable voltage aswell, so as you can tell, it’s not just a ‘fad’ for me. So yes, electronic cigarettes have definitely worked for me and my wife. My wife does not have to use her asthma inhaler anywhere near as much as she used to, which is great. Her chest is still a little wheezy, but we have only just started vaping really, so i’m sure that will improve with time. All in all, i’m glad my wife saw her friend using an electronic cigarette at bingo that day, otherwise i’d still be an out-of-breath, depressed, argumentative husband to my wife and she’d be the same back to me, and round and round we’d go. E-cigs have made a massive difference to our lives, so much so that it’s become such a normal part of our lives now that i had to stop and think how much it really has changed our lives just to write this. If the proposed EU legislation gets the go-ahead, and e-cigs become medicinal products, and the juice’s nicotine content gets limited to 4mg then that would be a major disaster in our lives because that would render our current e-cigs more or less useless to us, and as NRT clearly doesn’t work for us, the only alternative would be to go back to smoking, and i really really don’t want that to happen. I haven’t got the strength to go back to the start and begin all this ‘stop-smoking’ game again, i just can’t do it, i would just resign myself to the fact that i’m going to be a sad smelly smoker again, and look forward to a low death thanks to those in power who, to be quite honest, should really know better!