About the author
Why I write
This site grew out of two things I have loved for as long as I can remember: books, and caring for people. Reading and writing on one side. Nursing, guiding, and above all inspiring people to face what is hard in their lives, an addiction, a chronic illness, on the other.
I am a pulmonary nurse and a smoking cessation coach. For many years I have cared for people with lung disease, first on the ward and now in the outpatient clinic, where I also guide the ones who decide, or need, to stop smoking.
The worksheets, articles and books on this site come from that work, and from something older: a curiosity about why people feel and act the way they do, and how that understanding can be put to use. The books themselves come from further back still, from a childhood spent reading and the wish to one day write one of my own.
The long way to a first book
Childhood: a typewriter in the bedroom
As a child I read everything I could find, and before long I was writing too. I had an old typewriter in my bedroom and I sat behind it for hours, typing stories that were far too long and far too dramatic. When the first computers arrived in my teens, I simply kept going. Somewhere in those years a wish took root that never left: one day I would write a book of my own.
The pulmonary ward
Nursing came first, and caring for people turned out to be the other thing I love. Many years of my working life were spent on a pulmonary ward, nursing people with all kinds of lung problems and conditions: infections, flare-ups of asthma and COPD, lung cancer, and the care that is needed when treatment has reached its end. Some came in with an infection and went home within days. Some came back again and again as their COPD advanced. Some did not go home at all.
Specialising
After those years on the ward I went on to specialise. My post-graduate training included pharmacotherapy, which means I am authorised to prescribe inhaled medication within my field, and I trained as a smoking cessation coach. I am listed in KABIZ, the Dutch quality register for healthcare professionals, and work to the national care standard for tobacco and nicotine dependence.
The outpatient clinic
These days my work is in the outpatient clinic, where I see people with asthma or COPD and help them live with a lung disease that will not go away. Smoking is part of that for some of them, but far from all of it. Alongside that clinic I run the smoking cessation consultations, for my own patients and for people referred by a family doctor or a specialist.
The reading that never stopped
Through all of it, the reading never stopped. It only changed shape: a new study on nicotine, a guideline update, a paper on what happens in the brain during a craving. I read because I want to understand, and then I want to explain. That is where the articles on this site come from.
The worksheets
There was never a shortage of material. There were quit plans, leaflets, information about what smoking does to the lungs — all of it general, all of it written for the whole of quitting at once. What was missing was anything for the specific moments. The client who wakes at three in the morning. The one who is grieving something they cannot name. The one who would rather keep smoking than watch the scale move. Those moments come back in almost every consultation, and there was nothing to hand over for any of them.
So I started writing the pages I wanted to hand over. These are the sheets I use in my own consultations and share with colleagues, and I keep making new ones for the problems that come up week after week.
The books
The biggest wish of all is the one I started on last: writing books. The first ones are small books for people who are quitting, written for one hard stretch at a time, and easy for a clinician to recommend. The plan is to grow from there, towards fuller books that go deeper. I am in my late forties, and I have only just started. That is the strange and wonderful thing about a wish you carry long enough: it does not fade. It waits until you have something worth saying.
Every page is built on national standards for tobacco dependence and on published evidence, and checked against the guidance in each. Most of the practitioners who use these sheets work in seven countries, and those are the standards I check against: the Dutch Zorgstandaard Tabaks- en nicotineverslaving, NICE guidance on tobacco in the United Kingdom, Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence in the United States, the RACGP guidance on supporting smoking cessation in Australia, the New Zealand Guidelines for Helping People to Stop Smoking, Stop Smoking (National Clinical Guideline No. 28) in Ireland, and Tobacco Smoking in Adults from the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care.
The sheets are not limited to those countries. They are written to be used anywhere, and nothing on them depends on a national system. If you work to a guideline that is not listed here and you would like it added, write to me.
None of the sheets asks for a diagnosis. None of them promises anything — the days themselves are the result, not the page.
Written for smoking cessation, not adapted from general therapy material.
No lectures. No scare tactics.