Today is day three of The Great Nicotine Trial. I’m using store brand patches that are labelled as having 21 mg of nicotine, and store brand gum labelled as 4 mg of nicotine. Here are my thoughts so far:

The patch instructions say to put it on a hairless part of your arms or upper body. On day one, I stuck a patch to the underside of my left forearm, near the elbow macaroni. After several hours, its occasional contact with the end of my shirt sleeve caused it to come off. Attempts at re-sticking the same patch on the same surface were less than successful. So, on day two, I tried to protect the patch by placing it inside my sleeve, stuck to the hairless side of my upper arm. This fell off within two hours. Thus, this morning I looked around the house for something I could wrap around the patch to keep it in place. I found an ice pack belt with no ice pack in it. This was far too large to wrap around my arm, so I put the day’s nicotine patch on the side of my torso (about halfway between hip and nip) then wrapped the ice-pack-less belt around my mid-section. It has now been on for four hours and is showing no signs of trying to escape. Still, when I go to replenish my supply, I’ll probably try a name brand to see if they stick better.

As for the gum, it tastes minty at first. Not too bad, really. But after a few minutes, the mint flavor is gone, and what remains is horrible. After a few more minutes, it starts irritating my throat to the point where I start coughing, and that’s when I stick the gum to the bottom of my desk.

The friend who brought this whole nicotine thing to my attention said that he crushes nicotine lozenges and mixes them into his coffee. So, maybe I’ll try some lozenges when I run out of the gum. But I don’t drink coffee. I may have to fall back on my college drinking mantra: Anything is good when mixed with Mountain Dew.

OK, now I wanna hurl.