Bernie Tobin's life is a story about the triumph of the human spirit. The bubbly 40-year-old dress designer from Ringsend in Dublin - her birthday is today - was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when she was 10. Since then she has had 32 different operations.
Her last three were for hip replacements, two - one of which went wrong - in 1997, and a rerun last March. She was so grateful to the surgeon at Cappagh Hospital, Bill Quinlan, that she did a sponsored walk for the hospital in August.
"I felt so good after that walk that I wanted to do the mini-marathon. But I also found that I couldn't breathe because of the 20 cigarettes, 40 at weekends, I was smoking. So I decided I would have to give them up."
Before that she had gone on a diet, because she could not risk gaining extra weight which would put pressure on her fragile joints. She has lost 31/2 stone in the past year.
Yesterday Bernie won the 1998 Nicorette Stop Smoking Achievement Award and a holiday for her and her husband, Jim, in Barbados.
She had been a severe addict. "I loved smoking so much that I'd go without pain-killers rather than cigarettes," she said.
"Whenever I had severe pain I'd always reach for a cigarette. I couldn't even quit before operations. I'd have my last puff in my operation gown. I would choose the hospital to have the operation based on whether or not they had a smoking room rather than nearness to my home.
"When I needed a smoke I'd persuade the nurses to wheel me down to the smoking room in my bed while attached to a morphine drip."
Although she owns a dress design and repair shop in Sandymount, she does most of her work at home, because her two assistants in the shop still smoke. So does her husband, although he has promised to give up after her birthday.
The two runners-up in the competition were Andrew O'Shea from Thurles, Co Tipperary, and Theresa Keogh from Tallaght, Co Dublin. Ms Keogh (36), who used to smoke 60-80 a day, gave up because her six-year-old daughter suffers badly from asthma, and "because my mother, who is 66, could walk faster than I could".