Whidbey General Hospital is offering a free class during October to help people break from tobacco addiction.
The class, “Four Weeks to Freedom from Tobacco,” is run by respiratory therapist and certified tobacco treatment specialist Katherine Riddle.
“My most important credentials are, I’m an ex-smoker,” Riddle said. “That seems to be really important for some folks.”
“I do have a lot of empathy for the process,” she added.
The four-week course helps people identify their smoking patterns and triggers, teaches them how to deal with stress, substitute behaviors and more. It also provides people with group support, since everyone else in the class is going through the same process of quitting.
“I think group support is really important,” Riddle said. “It’s not just about the facilitator, it’s about a whole group effort.”
Riddle herself was a smoker for 20 years, and is tobacco-free for almost the same length of time. She said she’d tried quitting a few times before it stuck.
“I had a really tough time, and I couldn’t understand why it was so difficult,” Riddle said. “I tried lots of different techniques.”
Riddle said she’d decided that she was “tired of losing to tobacco.”
“People need to keep trying, and they really need to want to quit,” she said.
The class, offered five times a year, usually in January, March, May, August and October, is only one of the tobacco programs at Whidbey General Hospital helping to support tobacco-free lives.
Riddle said they offer one-hour information sessions, give presentations at the college, the Island County Detention Center, health fairs, school health classes and more.
“We pretty much take our information anywhere anyone wants to hear it, and everything we do is free to the public,” Riddle said.
She said that if the group classes or presentations don’t work for a person, she even offers one-on-one classes.
“We’re trying our best to offer as much free help as we can to individuals who are really trying to become tobaccofree.”
People who attend all four weeks of the class are also being offered vouchers for a free, two-week supply of nicotine replacement patches or gum.
“Quitting is easy,” Riddle said, “staying tobacco free is really the point of this whole thing.”
Because of that, she does follow-up calls with the class participants at three months, six months and a year. She said that at the year mark, the quit rate for the people attending this class is about 40 percent.
“Don’t get discouraged,” said Riddle.
“Keep trying. Because that’s really what it takes.”
“Stubborn really helps.”
