A Peek through the Escape Hatch…and other minor details

So tonight after half a day of teaching blessed souls who want so badly to do well in freshman comp (in spite of not knowing how to frame a thesis statement or write an idiomatic sentence), it was off to the new real estate course. It looks good. I enjoyed it, enjoyed the instructor, and came away feeling pretty upbeat. Very upbeat.

The textbook is around $65, but I can get a 10% discount with my faculty card. Natchurly, I didn’t have it with me this evening. Tomorrow I have to take the car to the repair shop, there, we hope, to fix whatever is making the ominous noise—that’ll be a pricey fix, you can be sure. So I won’t be able to buy the book until Thursday, when I’m back on campus to teach again.

Meanwhile, I made a little discovery: for those of us who are given to startling back pain, the amount of quinine in a can of tonic water may be enough to quiet the muscle spasms that give rise to that pain.

For the past week or ten days, I’ve been enjoying an ongoing storm of back spasms. They started in the neck and shoulder and by yesterday had worked their way down to the lower back, which I hate even more than upper back pain. So insistent were these spasms that I could actually feel a muscle in my back twitching. Ugh.

So of course I had recourse to the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest: to wit, the Internet. Googled “back muscle twitching.” And lo! It develops that a whole flock of neurotics suffer the same phenomenon. Many of them highly praise quinine.

Alas, though, some 1 percent of 1 percent of humanity has a dangerous sensitivity to quinine. Make that a life-threatening sensitivity. In response, Big Brother has taken quinine pills, which deliver a respectable dose, right off the market.

Well. In response to something. One message board contained a squib from a practicing pharmacist, who said quinine was not going to hurt you. The real story is that the patent ran out on said pills, widely loved by sufferers of those nasty leg and foot cramps that strike in the wee hours. Big Pharma, unhappy with this development, lobbied to have the drug banned. It’s now back on the market in a new, wildly expensive patented form, presently approved only as a malaria cure. So if you want it, you have to find out what it’s called and then find a doctor who can be persuaded to prescribe it for an off-label use, which is exactly the same as the previously on-label use for which it was prescribed for years. Yes.

Numerous comment posters touted drinking 8 ounces of tonic water about three to five hours before retiring. Various sufferers responded, always with one of two answers: it either worked like Jesus touching Lazarus or it didn’t do a damn thing.

Now I know I’m not allergic to quinine, having ingested more than my share of tonic water over the years. So it was off to the Safeway, there to grab a six-pack of little cans full of the stuff. And a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, not wanting to waste the trip.

The result?

One 12-ounce can of the stuff (abetted by a slug or two of gin) is definitely, unmistakably Jesus touching Lazarus. By the time I crawled into the sack, the twitching had stopped, once and for all. Not a single tic. And though the pain was still there, the gawdawful knife stab had abated enough that I could actually find a comfortable position to sleep. Crapped out around 10 p.m. and slept all the way through until 6 in the morning. That’s some kind of a record.

This morning my back still ached a little, but it wasn’t excruciating. Getting out of bed did not elicit a moan or a cry of pain. I was able to lift Cassie off the bed without fear of dropping her. And the pain has stayed at bay. In fact, it’s actually improved slightly. Right now we’re coming on to 9:30 and it hardly hurts at all.

Tonic water. Don’t forget the Bombay Sapphire.

🙂

Image: A bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin that is half full. Ben Efros. Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.