Not Everything Was Taken by the Smoke
Sara, Romina, and Sofía: Three Women, Three Bodies, One Shared Breath
For decades, Sara, Romina, and Sofía lived trapped in the slow combustion of tobacco. Nothing—not expensive treatments, nor guilt, nor illness—achieved what a single electronic cigarette did: it gave them back their breath. This is a story of addiction, autonomy, and institutional silence.
One was a teenager when she lit her first cigarette. Another smoked in the hospital corridors with a lung that barely worked. The third carried the guilt of smoking even while pregnant. None of them found a clear way out through the healthcare system. What saved them wasn’t a prescribed medicine, but a self-taught decision: to vape. In an interwoven chronicle, three women recount with rawness and clarity how they learned to breathe again. What they inhale today is not just vapor — it’s freedom.
April, or the Month of Air
At some point in April, without a marked date or prior ceremony, three women stopped smoking. It wasn't a miracle, nor an accident. It wasn’t a medical imposition or a miracle product sold on television. It was a shift in breath, almost imperceptible at first, like when the body begins to unlearn an ancient language.
One of them remembers it with unsettling clarity: “That day, I felt clean air dancing in my lungs for the first time,” said Romina, as if oxygen had music. She was 37, with two decades of smoke etched into her throat. In another city, Sara, younger, her speech tinged with an Argentine accent, had gone from rolling cigarettes to dismantling them. Not out of desperation, but curiosity. And in a rural village in northern Spain, Sofía—a fragile body marked by a long history of addiction—clung to her vaporizer with the serenity of someone who had survived herself.
They didn’t know each other. They never crossed paths in a waiting room, nor shared a drag. Yet their stories—scattered across different geographies and childhoods—end up intertwined by a single question, one that now hangs in the air like a final, unexhaled breath: Why did no one ever tell them about vaping?
First Inhalation: The Origin of Smoke
To understand how one gets out, one must first understand how one gets in. None of them lit their first cigarette out of ignorance. They did it to belong, to imitate, out of desire, out of inheritance. They did it for the ritual.
Sara, for instance, was sixteen when she lit her first cigarette. She remembers it with liturgical precision: the brush of the paper, the dry snap of the match, the acrid scent slipping between her fingers like a secret. It was her first year of university, far from her family home in Argentina—and equally distant from the unspoken rules of her former world. Smoking was more than a gesture; it was a declaration of autonomy.
"I did it for the group, of course. But also for that unforgettable smell. It was as if the smoke was promising me something."
What it promised, however, soon turned into a debt. Two packs during nights out with friends. Athletic performance, ruined. Her face pale after every workout. As if her body had begun to present the bill. She had already quit handball.
For Romina, the beginning came earlier: she was barely thirteen when the cigarette became part of the emotional furniture of her days. For years, the harsh taste of tobacco was her daily alarm clock. It’s not that she didn’t try to quit—she did, more than ten times: with Champix, with willpower, with guilt. Even during her two pregnancies, when the desire to protect was eclipsed by the anxiety of the next drag.
Sofía, the oldest of the three, spent more than half her life trapped between smoke and panic. Three packs a day. Then rolling tobacco, naively believing that the act of rolling might ease the craving. What it did, instead, was deepen the dependence. She slept half-seated to avoid suffocating. Smoked in the hospital corridors in the middle of the night, defying No Smoking signs like someone clinging to an invisible rope.
"It was that or the abyss," she recalls—without exaggeration.
Second Drag: The Body That Resists
Each of them experienced moments of fracture. It wasn’t anti-smoking campaigns or medical sermons that opened the crack—it was the bodily experience of reaching a limit.
For Sara, it came with the realization that the craving persisted even as the nicotine waned. Rolling cigarettes was no longer enough. The smell—once seductive—had turned into a trace of confinement. It was upon encountering a poster about combustion-free tobacco that something shifted. She researched. She understood that the physical harm diminished, but the ritual addiction remained intact.
It was like swapping a knife for a spoon: less dangerous, but still present.
Romina, for her part, found something unexpected in vaping. In the early hours of exhaustion and searching, she came across testimonies in online forums—lives rescued from smoke like messages cast into the sea. She bought a kit with 16 mg of nicotine. Her thought was modest: “If I manage to cut down by 25%, I’ll already be satisfied.”
But the result was different. Nine months without lighting a single cigarette. Today, she’s down to 3 mg, leaves the house without her device, and misses nothing.
"Not in a million years would I light one again," she says, with a firmness tinged by astonishment.
Sofía was the last to arrive, but perhaps the one who had fallen the furthest. When her partner showed her videos by El Mono about vaping, she laughed. Skeptical. But she gave it a try. Bought a second-hand kit. And, for the first time in 26 years, went an entire week without lighting a cigarette. She never looked back. In August 2020, she gave up nicotine as well.
"Like changing a sweater," she says.
Third Drag: What No One Teaches
What cost them the most was not quitting smoking—that came later—but unlearning. Unlearning the belief that only the doctor holds the key to salvation. Vaping did not enter their lives as a prescription, but as heresy.
Sofía puts it bluntly: “I didn’t heal in a clinic—I healed on YouTube.” She spent weeks watching tutorials, reading forums, grasping what no one had ever explained to her clearly. She learned to distinguish liquid types, coils, nicotine levels. Learned to care for a device on which her future now depended.
Sometimes she thinks it was like learning to breathe again—but in a borrowed language.
Sara studied as well—with the obsessive precision of someone who refuses to fail this time. Thirty hours of videos, technical articles, ex-smoker blogs. Each click was a question unanswered in a waiting room.
Her first drag of vapor wasn’t a revelation—it was an experiment. But she soon realized that her body was beginning to yield, to cleanse, to release.
The hardest part wasn’t giving up cigarettes. It was facing other people’s disbelief.
—Do you really think that’s any better?
—That’s still smoking, just in disguise.
—Liquid nicotine is worse.
—You’re going to grow an extra ear on your hand.
Romina laughs when she recalls those phrases. She’s heard them all. And yet, no doctor ever offered her an alternative with the same conviction with which they prescribed pills. “It amazes me that something so effective is so silenced. Out of fear? Out of ignorance? Or because of interests?”
The same question, shaded with different nuances, echoes from all three mouths.
The Anatomy of Environment
These stories cannot be fully understood without looking around. What we smoke also depends on where we are—and who is listening.
In the many neighborhoods where Romina grew up, smoking was part of the scenery. Mothers smoked, fathers smoked, teachers smoked. No one spoke of harm: tobacco was a companion, not an enemy.
When she tried to quit during pregnancy, she received more judgment than support. And when she finally succeeded, she was met with silence.
Sara migrated to Spain just as her body began to demand air. What she found wasn’t a healthcare system open to new approaches, but a fragmented landscape where vaping was synonymous with uncertainty and misinformation. She learned on her own what someone in a white coat could easily have taught her. And even today, she still wonders: Why does preventive medicine ignore what works?
Sofía lives in a village where no one —not until now— speaks of vaping. The tobacconists still sell only traditional cigarettes. Her neighbors eye her with suspicion, as if her small vaporizer were some kind of science fiction device.
And yet it is that very device that gives her the 99% oxygen saturation reflected in her medical check-ups. The quietest trophy of her life.
Final Exhalation: What Lingers in the Air
All of them left tobacco behind. All of them healed outside official protocols. And all of them have something more to say—not as experts, but as survivors.
Sara, her voice steady, leaves a hypothesis hanging in the air, one that sounds almost self-evident:
“What if teaching about vaping were part of preventive medicine?”
Romina offers a provocation:
“I still don’t understand why they let so many people die. What kind of interests are at play?”
Sofía, finally, looks out at the world with her vaporizer in hand and says:
“I used to be smoke. Today, I am air.”
Their words don’t end with full stops, but in suspension. Like an open breath. As if there were still much left to be said—between invisibility and reclamation, between isolation and resistance. As if the final breath were not an ending, but a beginning. A quiet dignity.