Acomplia Was Riding Out to Save Me

These are my true life confessions. Hopefully, they’ll help you get through your problems. If someone like me can make it, so can you.

I was more than a little desperate until Acomplia came along but, with its help, I’ve been slowly turning my life around. It’s been slow and hard. Make no mistake. Acomplia’s good but you have to back it up with your own will power or fear, whichever’s the stronger.

So where to start? The only place we really focus is when we realise how easily we can die. I was 35 years old, a smoker, a drinker and overweight. Not a worry in my head.

Go back twenty years and I was already smoking, but fit — a swimmer good enough to represent the school in local competitions. A county coach was keen for me to go on with it, wanted me to train every morning before school with the others that might make it to the next level. But I’d had my first few nights of drinking out with the lads. Pubs look the other way when they’re busy. Why should they care. It’s only money to them.

So, come sixteen, I was out of school and walked into work at a local factory. And that was an end of the swimming. When the money came on tap, I was out every night, drinking steady, grabbing burgers whenever I was hungry.

Then thirty-five rolls round and you find me in an emergency ward at the local hospital with a heart attack, reperfusion complete and a shiny new stent in place. This was early 2006. I was in a teaching hospital so every consultant had a pack of followers for the rounds. It frightens you when you see the future of the human race depends on these spotty kids. Anyway, I was a classic case — something to be proud of at last. Everything done wrong for twenty years, now paying the price. Lucky not to have died. May need a pacemaker if the arrhythmia doesn’t settle down.

Now I’m already twitching. I was a forty-a-day man and I’d gone two days of consciousness after the anaesthetic without a cigarette. They’d appointed a nurse who was counselling me on how to quit. I was signed up for cognitive behavioural therapy and a relapse prevention programme. They were taking me seriously, but I was anxious and worried about how I’m about to die, and that was making the craving worse. Holding a death stick is soothing. Drawing a deep breath, feeling the smoke go way down into your lungs. Holding it and then slowly streaming it out. It’s calming. Striking a rhythm of slower breathing, relaxing.

It should be a no-brainer to stop. I’d always had that vague worry about cancer (what with all those warnings on the pack), but it was the heart giving out first — well, one of the arteries. But habits can be hard to break.

The consultant was shaking his head. But, for once, it was good news. Help was on the way. He knew someone who’d been working on the Acomplia clinical trials (actually, the trials were run under the generic name Rimonabant which I found really confusing). The results were encouraging. And they were expecting regulatory approval for a launch in July — only two months away. In the meantime, they were going to sign me up for group therapy sessions for the smoking, and assign someone to teach me how to eat better food.

I was asking about starting exercise again, not understanding how a heart attack affects you. He looked at the charts again and then told me about the risks of a ventricular aneurysm. I had damage to the left ventricle. I should be all right but, to be sure, I was going to have to rest and then only light exercise for a good few months. It would be better when the weight started to come down which, hopefully it would quite quickly when I started on this Acomplia.

So there I was. I had to hold out for two months or so until I could buy Acomplia (never have sold it here as Rimonabant). Then, with any luck, I’d find it easier to control the craving for cigarettes and my dieting should be easier. Two birds with one stone. That was the theory.

Acomplia was a white knight that would rescue me if only the UK would approve it.

Fortunately, the UK signed off on Acomplia in July. But that was several relapses away.