Health care

The other day I was holding forth about my puzzlement over my parents’ loathing of my undergraduate boyfriend. And yes, they did hate him, and hate is the operative term. That post speculates that it was because of his Eastern European ancestry.

Could be.

But this morning it occurs to me that there was a different reason. A better reason.

Paul was the one who introduced me to the use of alcohol. Make that the daily use of alcohol. (I was about 17 years old at the time…)

You understand: my parents were no teetotalers. They generally had a cocktail or two before dinner, and they were known to get extravagantly sh!t-faced on the bootleg booze passed around at gringo parties in Saudi Arabia. But they didn’t give it to me, nor did they invite me to join them in their informal pre-prandial whiskey-swilling, not even as an adult.

Yes: they did drink whiskey, a variety of which we could distill in lovely Araby. My father had a still on the stove and a couple of huge jars in the janitorial closet for that purpose. This was vastly against Saudi law. But nothing was done about it, presumably because the Kingdom was making too much money selling oil to the apostate gringos to make a fuss over their drinking habits.

When we got back to the States, my parents continued their pre-dinner-hour swiggling. At that point, they were never getting drunk. They were just having a cocktail with food and cigarettes, unwinding before dinner.

Meanwhile, though…back at the college campus: Paul and I drank all the time. We would start when classes were over — often as early as 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon — and tipple until we tipped over into the sack. That that meant he and I were drinking a lot more than my parents were, and we were doing it every day.

Once I got quit of Paul, I did quit drinking that much. I continued to have wine with dinner, but I rarely drank hard liquor, and I didn’t swill wine all afternoon.

However, to this day I still pour a glass or so of wine with dinner.

And…Lookee Here!

Turns out chronic alcohol use can lead to neuropathy.

No wonder my hands and feet and lips tingle!

If that article is accurate, my case must be pretty mild. But the booze habit may very well be the source of the buzz in the paws!

Of all those melodramatic symptoms, the only one I’ve encountered (so far) is tingling in the hands, feet, and lips.

Hmmmm…  It looks as though you can make this ailment remit — at least to some extent — simply by going on the wagon. This may or may not work…but apparently for some folks, it does.

I’ll be damned…think o’that!

And how hard would it have been for one of those MayoDocs to simply ASK me how much I drink and then suggest I climb onto the wagon?

Pretty clearly, the treatment is to quit swilling booze every day. 😀

Whether this will stop the current tingle-fest is unclear. But apparently if you quit boozing, you can at least block the neuropathy’s progression.

LOL! Welp, my dear late parents didn’t have the right reason for disliking pore ole’ Paul. But they were right that I should have gotten quit of him as a boyfriend. No booze-swilling boyfriend: no booze-swilling.

😀