One Thing or Another: Pills for All Our Ills
One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at life, aging, and the absurdities of it all.
Mark McNease
Too many episodes of heartburn after a meal? It must be GERD! Cholesterol numbers not what they should be? Here’s a statin!
I don’t know about your doctor—how could I?—but my primary care physician is one of those nice, softspoken, well-meaning doctors with a great office manner who reacts to every ill I present him with by prescribing some new medication. Most recently, it was something for Restless Leg Syndrome, which I dutifully took as prescribed for several weeks while I kept reading about its applications and side effects. Two things stood out: it can increase my risk of deadly melanoma, and it shouldn’t be stopped without first weaning off it for an extended period of time. Hmm, I thought, finger to lips while I processed this information. I’m not interested in making myself more vulnerable to skin cancer than I already am, as a fair-skinned older man of British and Irish descent. And I really don’t want to take something I can’t decide to stop taking without lowering the dose first over a period of weeks. I don’t have the patience for it, and I don’t like anything that can have its hooks that deeply into me.
Of course I stopped on my own, with just a day of real or imagined discomfort. The bigger issue for me is that my doctor, like too many others, made no attempt to determine if I do, in fact, have Restless Leg Syndrome. This kind of instant diagnosis happens all the time. Too many episodes of heartburn after a meal? It must be GERD! Cholesterol numbers not what they should be? Here’s a statin!
One Thing or Another: Cats, Kittens And Chaos
One Thing or Another: Life, Aging, and the Absurdities of it All
By Mark McNease
We recently lost another beloved cat, if you can refer to ending their lives as mercifully as possible that way. It’s both a euphemism and a truism: the space where Peanut had been for over five years is empty now. I left the soft orange runner on the floor by the kitchen sink where she ate, separately from our other girl Wilma. It reminds us of her, and it will always be where she had been. I’m also turning her litter box into a flower garden, with her name on a small marker. But she is gone, and it’s a sadness that will remain as long as we remember her.
We’ve said goodbye this way to five other cats over the past 17 years, and it never stops being one of the most difficult experiences we accept into our lives in exchange for sharing them with animals. The only thing more I’ll say about it is that it always feels like a betrayal of their unwavering trust, and yet we are entrusted too with making sure they don’t suffer more than dying inflicts on them already. It’s a terrible guessing game.
Dreamshaping: Seeds of Doubt
Enjoy an audio small plate. Her name is Bella, and she’ll be your server today.
It’s never too early to doubt yourself. While that’s unlikely to be spoken by the most advanced two-year-old, it seems to be one of the earliest concepts we learn. We teeter on our tiny feet, attempting to walk for the first time. The giants in our lives encourage us, cheering us on to put one foot in front of the other, and then … we tumble. Our faces scrunch up. We probably cry. We wait awhile, looking for signs of approval, and we try again.
One Thing or Another: Out With the New
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
As another year begins and we make promises to ourselves, if not outright resolutions, why not stop and consider the changes we don’t want to make? The things about our lives that we’re pleased to have in them: events, people, situations, even qualities about ourselves we would not change. I quite like most of my life, and while I want to lose some serious poundage for health and vanity, I can’t say there are many other things I would change about it.
One Thing or Another: Found At Sea
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
Bodies of water hold a fascination for many people, as well as providing an indescribable comfort. I grew up in an Indiana town with two rivers, and I live just a mile from the magnificent Delaware flowing slowly between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. For me there has always been something about the movement of these vast waterways that felt like home, as if I really am a fish out of water longing to jump back in where I belong and swim away.