"I want to quit."

Uncertain of who we are or what we do, sometimes this is all they say.

She tells me she is 73 and she has been smoking since she was a young girl. The girls she worked with as a domestic would take breaks and offer her a cigarette. It was the only time she ever stopped to relax or slow down.

JSI Try-To-STOP staff Alice Meile, Rachel Morse, Margarida Santos, Melissa Sparks and Jessica Liborio discussing provider materials in the Massachusetts Tobacco Education Clearinghouse.

"I didn't know back then... I wish I'd never started... I see these young people, so young, smoking now and I want to tell them, 'Don't start!'"

If I can offer her the hope of quitting for good, concrete information and tools with which to begin her quit plan, and words of compassionate reassurance—all within our 12-minute protocol—then my expectations for my day as a member of the Try-To-STOP Team have already been met.

These are the calls that can come at 9 am, when the lines open, or as the last call of the day at 6:58 pm, two minutes before we shut down. Today, while I multitask my other responsibilities as HelpLine Supervisor, this woman's story stays with me.

The Tobacco Free HelpLine received its first call on September 4, 2001, but the commitment and work to create this one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art, integrated Call Center began long before. During periods of high caller volume—as many as 123 calls in a single, ten-hour day!—the components of the Call Center are highly visible. They include the Massachusetts Tobacco Education Clearinghouse, the Tobacco Free HelpLine and the trytostop.org website.

Every day, materials from our extensive, multilingual Clearinghouse are invoiced, packed and shipped locally and across the country to tobacco control programs, schools, health professionals, and tobacco treatment programs. I work in a team of 16, all of whom perform a range of daily tasks associated with managing operations, delivery of services, and fluctuating budgets. Each day we are in some way reminded of our primary mission—to implement a visionary and active model to eradicate an epidemic that causes 440,000 deaths annually in the U.S. and nearly four million premature deaths worldwide. Most often, we're reminded by a story shared by a caller to our confidential Tobacco Free HelpLine, which we operate Monday through Friday in three languages—English, Spanish and Portuguese—and TDD (Telecommunication Device for the Deaf). Each telephone intervention can bring a parent, an isolated widow, a pregnant woman, a teen, a trucker, a health care professional, or a service industry worker one step closer to freedom from tobacco addiction. All of us who work the phones can recount times when a caller has come to tears over the struggle to quit tobacco, sharing that she or he already has one or more of the devastating,tobacco-induced illnesses, or telling of related losses of family members.

We are equally validated and inspired by call-backs to the HelpLine in which previous callers and website registrants, using our Quit Wizard or bulletin board, offer feedback and sincere gratitude for our services that helped them to quit. We actually have people who take the time to tell us this program works!

"I want to quit." While I can find it challenging to negotiate daily the unsettling realities of callers' life experiences with tobacco—the expressions of hopelessness and frustration or denial—I always look for a shift in tone, an indication of a sense of relief, which says, in that moment, albeit brief, "I can quit."

I know that each successive intervention increases a tobacco user's chance of quitting for good. For this, the value of my work is immeasurably satisfying.

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