Henare "H" Kaa is a singer and drummer with the band Dillastrate, based in Ōtautahi Christchurch. He's the latest in our series about kicking old ways to the curb.
I started smoking around the age of 15, hiding my cigarette packs in the subwoofer speakers of my Aiwa CD player. That was the most skux thing a kid pushing trolleys at Ashburton Countdown could buy. I thought my parents (who are anti-anti-anti-smoking) would never discover this adolescent hiding spot. I was wrong, my parents found my stash. But this wasn’t enough to deter me from the hit my lungs had become accustomed to. Smoking became my right-hand man for the next nine to ten years. There was the occasional month or two off but mostly, the orange-headed, analogue dart was burnt between 20-30 times a day.
I remember the first ciggy being real punishing and it felt like I coughed a lung out. But I endured the pain and continued the challenge of overcoming the lung dart. Before I knew it I was addicted. I remember the addiction being sneaky. When I first started I could go days without a smoke but then the time between stumps became shorter and shorter. Instead of days, it became hours, then sometimes minutes. Drinking and socialising with friends was the perfect environment for smoking because back then it didn't cost an arm and a leg for a pack of darts. Sometimes my friends and I would go in on a pack and racks a few each out and that was our quota for a day on the tools at high school. I had no problem acquiring a pack of ciggies while I was underage because I had a friend in year 10 who looked like he was 30.
In 2013, I began the life of an educator and full-time musician, so cigarettes became more of a dependency and a must-have in order to survive the day-to-day interactions with kids who bashed the drum kit I had set up in the school dental clinic, and the weekend late-night alcohol-infused party gigs. Cigarettes were part of the night-and-day uniform. But then I met the love of my life who, 11 years later, is my beautiful wife and the mother to my adorable and fast-growing tamahine (daughter). A combination of her outlook on smoking and a wake-up-call visit to the dentist (I had four abscesses which he attributed to my smoking ) made me kick a pack-a-day habit to the curb.
It doesn't happen overnight
But unwinding an 11-year relationship isn't easy. Nothing compares to the pain your body goes through in the three to four months after quitting. I'd been doing serious harm to my body, and my body let me know it both physically and mentally. I went cold turkey after that trip to the dentist, and the withdrawals didn't truly start until about a month later. That's when my body began the healing process and I felt sharp pains in my chest, and random other things. The mental part was the worst though as I started getting real bad anxiety and having panic attacks for the first time in my life. Any small pain in my body would instantly lead me to think it was something severe and karma for smoking for all those years.
After a while I started smelling how bad cigarettes actually smell. The odour of someone coming inside after they had a ciggy was so bad and made me think how yuck I must have smelt to others when I smoked.
In 2015 I had surgery to remove a cyst from my vocal folds and the doctor asked me if I smoked to which I replied, “Not anymore I don’t". He said, “good boy because this could quite possibly have had a different cause than just bad vocal skills".
Both my mum’s parents were victims of cigarettes, and that wasn’t enough to deter me because the addiction is so strong.
I am a singer by trade, and extremely fortunate to have a career as a full-time, international touring and recording artist. Kicking the cigarettes was the greatest contribution to that.
Henare "H" Kaa is in the band Dillastrate which is part of the Waiata Anthems movement which celebrates its fifth birthday this month. Check out his track Kei Whati Te Marama and the accompanying documentary at waiataanthems.co.nz.
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