“I helped him quit smoking”

NUR SABRINA, 46, RETAIL ASSOCIATE, AND KHALID YUSOF, 50, GOLF INSTRUCTOR

A smoker since his 20s, the longest Khalid had managed to stay off cigarettes was for two years, in 2002 and 2003 – he did it because he and Sabrina were planning to conceive and they wanted to ensure a healthy pregnancy.

He fell off the bandwagon the very day she went into labour. Sabrina explains: “It was a mixture of the stress and seeing me in pain. As we were about to go to the hospital, he panicked and ran to the convenience store for a pack of cigarettes.”

After that, in spite of Sabrina’s protests, Khalid would regularly get through two packs a week – he claimed cigarettes helped him relax. Last year, after he began falling sick frequently, Sabrina decided that it was time for a change.

Sabrina roped in her nine-year-old daughter to her cause. She explains:“She’s everything to him and I knew he’d listen to what she would say. So when my daughter noticed the grotesque pictures on cigarette packs and asked me what they were, I told her it was what happened to smokers.”

That got her daughter riled up enough to urge Khalid to kick the habit. She would remind her father of smoking-related health problems and that more places in Singapore were becoming smoke-free zones – like their common corridor, where Khalid used to smoke.

Sabrina also encouraged Khalid to join the iQuit campaign started by the Health Promotion Board, which he finally did in August last year. Participants commit to staying smoke-free for 28 days. They are then required to take regular smokerlyser tests to measure carbon monoxide levels in their lungs.

On her part, Sabrina encouraged Khalid to cut down smoking at his own pace. She reminded him daily that she was proud of him and how important he was to her. “Even if it was one cigarette less a day, it was still a step forward,” she says. She also suggested that he keep himself busy to keep his mind off smoking.

Sabrina knew her efforts had paid off when Khalid’s smokerlyser test at Singapore General Hospital last October declared him 100 per cent clean, a sign that he’d laid off cigarettes completely since deciding to quit in August.

Sabrina says of his lifestyle change: “He did it once and I knew he could do it again. I’m happy that I supported him through the whole thing.”