I always believed in better living through chemistry. If you can make life better by "cheating" you should cheat, and while doing so can have side effects, there's no law of the universe that they must, and certainly no law of the universe that those side effects must be worse than the alternative.
People have spent forever trying to prove that artificial sweeteners are bad for you because they refuse to believe that you can get the joy of drinking a soda without the calories, or something worse, but it really doesn't seem like there is any basis for it. While it may still be better for you to just drink water, that leaves you stuck just drinking water. Personally, I've always wanted Famine's zero-calorie Food and Meals from Good Omens. Maybe someday.
Ha! You are singing my song! Decades after saccharine was taken out of diet sodas because doses equivalent to 800 cans per day caused bladder cancer in mice, I am STILL resentful! (I actually like saccharine’s bitter aftertaste. Weird, I know.)
We are just so terrible at understanding relative risk. The risk to me from melatonin is far lower than the risk of foregoing sleep. Many medications have side-effects that outweigh the benefits (a subject for a future post), but it looks like Ozempic and naltrexone are not among them.
Yeah, I don’t actually like sweets, thanks to my mom. When I was a kid, she was a follower of the nutritionists Adele Davis and Frances Moore Lappé and cooked with almost no sugar, so I never developed a taste for it. But when I do have something with sugar, I feel really awful afterwards—headachy and kind of blah.
I started using Stevia in my coffee years ago, now adding Chaga (rishi mushroom etc.) and it is a game changer on lowing the use of sugar. I am okay with the taste, and love it. A soda called Zevia too is very good.
Somewhere along the line in my total insomniac life I just went with the flow. I get up in the middle of the night and read or do grading of students. Then around 2-3pm I take a nap. I think I sleep about 6 hours in 24 but broken up. And there is biphasic sleep as well--https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep
Supposedly there is some evidence for this? Some historian claimed there were “2 sleeps” - or three - as people went to bed so much earlier with only candles, then maybe got up in the night to check their animals or do medieval person tasks, and eat something - then sleep more? But then I think someone else maybe debunked that. But apparently the words “during the second sleep” appear in the records in relation to when eg a crime was committed.
I too like to read in the night and find my attention is better, my mind quieter, and my eyes less strained - I can read for an hour in the middle of the night.
But only when husband is away.
ETA: Oh, sorry - I just saw your link to that very thing.
Yes, this has been my way this year… have become a recent insomniac due to a huge life shift and divorce etc. I have heard that about the biphasic sleep, common amongst some famous writers.
So now I am writing a play, so am testing this out with my new sleep patterns.
In the study linked below, women took an astonishing 300 mg of melatonin per day for 4 months! The study notes, "The medications did not alter sleep-wake rhythms and were not complicated by any side-effects." Hard to find any drug better tolerated than that.
My heart goes out to folks who have insomnia. I suffer very occasionally from insomnia, and I cannot imagine many more hellish things to face on a regular basis. I do suffer from a large amount of 'sleep inertia' (people that are awake, tend to stay awake; people that are asleep tend to stay asleep) and assorted other parasomnias - but those I can deal with.
I'm very drug-positive! I'll take anything that will help. But, I insist on having a decent estimate of the risks involved and the long-term implications. On the other side of the ledger is my wife, who needs to have a body part detached to justify a pain reliever. We've agreed to disagree on the topic.
Love the 'Jagged Little Pill' reference. For five years I drove an hour (one direction) to work. I generally listened to books to pass the time, but also had copies of 'Jagged Little Pill', 'Ella in Berlin' and 'Led Zeppelin II' for variety. I've listened to 'Jagged Little Pill' perhaps 75 to 100 times. Amazing album, amazing artist.
Your wife reminds me of my dad. He would just shrug off the craziest injuries he had incurred while building something, trimming the trees, or what have you. I think you and I are more sensible!
Your insomnia stories have always resonated with me. I'm "on the spectrum" at least, my regular routine seems to be on a 3-day cycle: good sleep -- no sleep -- some sleep -- good sleep ....
I think like you, it's been such a part of life since I can remember, and for a very long time I just assumed everyone was like that. Six minutes to fall asleep?! What the heck?
I don't usually get up or read or even turn on a light. I just start thinking... often about physics problems or some new topic of interest of mine. I try to avoid worrying about anything, although that sometimes can't be helped. Reconstructing old memories is also fun and passes the time.
But I do have a magic pill as well, for some reason ibuprofin will knock me out for a solid 4 hours of sleep. (But only at night, if I take it during the day it seems to have no effect. So maybe some similar mechanism to melatonin?) I don't take it very often, only if I'm particularly upset about something and know it will eat at me, or if I've got an early flight and need to be refreshed.
So interesting! Ibuprofen helps me fall asleep too, and like you, I don’t feel drowsy when I take it during the day. I wonder what the mechanism is?
And yes, I think a lot of the conversation about insomnia wrongly assumes that we’re lying awake worrying, when that is almost never the case for me, and it sounds like it isn’t for you either. We just have overactive brains and need a bit of pharmaceutical help to settle them down.
Mari, this is great info and perspective because I have suddenly (most of this year) become an insomniac and hope it is short lived. This week alone I had a night where I literally could not get tired enough mentally and did not sleep at all, but I assure you I was tired physically and it was a major day in San Francisco… but I effing laid there for so long, read, and was going crazy… part of that too was due to a recent bout of migraines. I think they are happening due to this issue though.
But I am one of those who will not take pills much, maybe believing the myths you mention and thinking they are bad for me. But that has been changing and I am going to try melatonin for sure. It is so hard not sleeping, and being semi tired so often.
Last night I did sleep well and wow what a difference, so am ready for a change, and a pill if that is needed.
I like this theme of not needing to suffer. I can't take HRT because my breast cancer was estrogen positive, so I've been suffering through menopausal symptoms and accepting it as a "new normal." Ugh. My Oncologist's PA just recommended acupuncture to me and it has given me such relief! We don't need to suffer. As you say, the cancer is suffering enough. For interested readers, I just wrote a column about this: https://www.cancernursingtoday.com/post/patients-with-breast-cancer-dont-have-to-live-with-pain
Menopause wasn’t all bad for me. For the first time I could wear short sleeves into the freezing cold grocery store in summer. It wasn’t freezing to me anymore. Some of that is weight gain, most likely. But I’m okay with that.
Once in awhile even though it’s years in the rear view, I’ll be getting dressed for something or other and have a little residual - “wait, do I need to carry a tampon (plus super pad, those final, endometrial years were so heavy!)”. And then I remember - oh yeah: no. A little like being ten again.
I have found it worthwhile to have at the ready a hair band and a little barrette for hot flashes. Helps to get hair off skin.
But all of this perhaps only barely makes up for the sadness of - oh, children aren’t a possibility anymore. That’s over. You had your shot.
Which for the great-grandmothers probably manifested as sweet relief.
I was looking at findagrave website in the course of a little local history reading, and noticing as was not wholly unusual (whooping cough? measles?) in the middle 19th century that one of our governors and his wife had the 11 children or whatever, of which three survived to adulthood, but seeing a list of all their DOBs and DODs really brought home how strange that for say 14 years, every two years you buried a child.
How awful. And this was a governor and his family, who presumably had better access to food and sanitation. Truly the best time in all of human history to be alive is right now.
I’m the child of an alcoholic - and not a progressively-gets-sillier alcoholic - an angry drunk - and I’m trying to picture him taking this medication. First, he would have to have been open to talking about it (never did, though a copy of “The Road Less Traveled” traveled strategically around the house for years, as Mother pointedly moved it from spot to spot where Anyone Interested Might Pick It Up; years after we had all left home, Mother reported that he had abruptly quit drinking, without telling her why - “something happened?” - and he only fell off the wagon a few times, though she reported he remained a “dry drunk”, a term she heard somewhere, but I didn’t really need her to tell me that lol).
What puzzles me is - the drinking, the life directed toward his buddies, toward hitting the bar after the stock market closed - was part and parcel with his sheer hatred of/discomfort with family life.
He absolutely couldn’t bear to be around us. Mother said it was that way from the very start.
When he had to be home, it was a period of building tension which must end in a binge (which presumably kept him going, kept him working - kept us fed!).
One may be grateful, in hindsight, if grateful for existence, for getting to live on earth in a time of cats and other cool things - for the power of conformity that once compelled young persons to pair up, in college, and begin married life directly!
Maybe it’s a paucity of imagination but I can’t even think what would have replaced alcohol. Something would have had to - because coming home was never in the cards.
Alcohol was a solution. Or as Homer Simpson famously observed - “the cause of and solution to all problems”.
In re insomnia: at night I fall asleep easily, over a book in bed - but when I inevitably wake and mind starts turning, I count backwards from a thousand (by sevens is not boring enough!) or set myself a mind puzzle like Sam Beaver, on some nature question; all while doing something two friends once shared as if everyone knew about it: “relaxing your tongue”. In my case, I can’t figure out what relaxing your tongue means, but I try and sometimes just thinking about one’s tongue is boring and yet perplexing enough to be the last thing I think about before drifting off.
Oh, and “relaxing your tongue” is a thing from singing! My voice teachers always had to remind me to relax my tongue (not the tip—the back part, which extends into the throat). Maybe I will try it when the melatonin isn’t working!
Yep, my Dad too was an angry drunk until I was eight, than a dry drunk most of the time after. Now just half alive…
But I was lucky enough to learn from that myself. Robert Bly, the Author of Iron John, describes the image of men in bars as being prevalent for modern men due to emotional and spiritual isolation. This takes the place of how men from the past had “soul unions” that were a positive in their life, but no more… and I can speak from experience that there is a void for a high percentage of men. Men now gather for golf, bars of course, hunting, but not so much for spiritually intimate reasons.
It was amazing to me to grow up and discover that so many people can drink - nightly - and at social occasions a very great deal, and just get happier and more lively, or “suffused with a warm glow”.
There’s clearly a difference in brain chemistry with my father and perhaps yours, or there’s something deeper that they are “self-medicating” - but I wonder also if it might have something to do with drinking from a young age, from basically childhood, which I suspect is true of mine.
I agree that it is amazing anyone can sustain being a drunk for long, where I am now really rejecting the social aspect of drinking more than I have ever. I live in wine country, Sonoma… so it is everywhere you go, and most functions. I do drink, but it can really change the dynamic of the energy with people to the point of annoyance. So I am more careful in my choices of who to be with and what to do socially around drinking.
I am so sorry. It must have been devastating to realize such a terrible thing about your father. Naltrexone obviously wouldn’t have worked for him, because it sounds like he did have serious underlying problems. Every child deserves to have parents who love them to infinity and beyond, and I am so sorry you didn’t have that.
You know, at some point it’s like that show “This Was Us”. I mean, not the show per se, which I’ve not seen - but the title. You have to think hard about how much you would change, given that we all partake of the same DNA in varying percentages. I think of our funhouse reflection, my late maternal uncle and his wife and my cousins and their genuinely happy family, their shared vacations and pictures of 20 people in matching shirts at a lake house. I love that about them, family is everything - and yet - we are different and not just in our nuclear decay. Different intrinsically.
I used to feel sorry for my mother. But after sixty-four years of their marriage, observing 5/6 of it - I have a certain “we all make our beds” attitude towards her married life. The effect of my father’s failure as a dad on my brothers is all that is now left to cause any pain, because it will never change and they seem ultimately to have been more vulnerable than I.
Plus they had extra years with him, and now I’m worried he might even manage to outlive one of them!
Glad the melatonin worked for you. I tried it a few weeks ago thinking it would help me not wake up in the middle of the night, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. I'd take the melatonin, sleep very very deeply for three hours, and then that was it, no more sleep for me.
"It’s amazing how quickly Ozempic has joined kleenex, xerox, band-aid and other brand names that we use as generic terms"
It's not amazing.It's not even true.The only people who use Ozempic as a generic term are the people who don't know any better.
Literally, no one who is using a GLP1 drug for weight loss is taking ozempic. Go ahead and google GLP1 and look at the results.None of the sponsored search results will include ozempic. When you get down to the articles occasionally you will see the word ozempic. That is because the writers are often just like you. They have no idea what they are talking about.
The reason ozempic has maintained its status as the most inaccurate drug term ever popularized by the media is because most of the people who are talking about ozempic don't actually use it.
I know, I know you probably feel offended at my brusque tone, but seriously, you're writing an article about how people should respect the fact that drugs can help with issues and then you can't even get the name right? It's annoying.
Try GLP1, it's fewer letters to type, and you won't look like an idiot to anybody who knows better. Added plus: even the people who don't know better will know what you mean.Have that for a win.
That's the point. The kleenex on my shelf isn't by the Kleenex brand. The band-aids in my medicine cabinet aren't Band-Aid branded. Using a brand as a generic term means you call the product that even when it's not by the exact brand.
Kleenex is in fact the best-selling brand of tissue. Bandaids are in fact the best-selling brand of bandages. Ozempic is not the bestselling brand of GLP1 obesity meds.
But it's better than that, of course, because--and here's the point speaking from miles over your head--Ozempic isn't even an obesity medication.
I always believed in better living through chemistry. If you can make life better by "cheating" you should cheat, and while doing so can have side effects, there's no law of the universe that they must, and certainly no law of the universe that those side effects must be worse than the alternative.
People have spent forever trying to prove that artificial sweeteners are bad for you because they refuse to believe that you can get the joy of drinking a soda without the calories, or something worse, but it really doesn't seem like there is any basis for it. While it may still be better for you to just drink water, that leaves you stuck just drinking water. Personally, I've always wanted Famine's zero-calorie Food and Meals from Good Omens. Maybe someday.
Ha! You are singing my song! Decades after saccharine was taken out of diet sodas because doses equivalent to 800 cans per day caused bladder cancer in mice, I am STILL resentful! (I actually like saccharine’s bitter aftertaste. Weird, I know.)
We are just so terrible at understanding relative risk. The risk to me from melatonin is far lower than the risk of foregoing sleep. Many medications have side-effects that outweigh the benefits (a subject for a future post), but it looks like Ozempic and naltrexone are not among them.
Sugar is a real killer, I do love desserts, but as I get older sugar is very difficult to manage in the body.
Yeah, I don’t actually like sweets, thanks to my mom. When I was a kid, she was a follower of the nutritionists Adele Davis and Frances Moore Lappé and cooked with almost no sugar, so I never developed a taste for it. But when I do have something with sugar, I feel really awful afterwards—headachy and kind of blah.
I started using Stevia in my coffee years ago, now adding Chaga (rishi mushroom etc.) and it is a game changer on lowing the use of sugar. I am okay with the taste, and love it. A soda called Zevia too is very good.
Somewhere along the line in my total insomniac life I just went with the flow. I get up in the middle of the night and read or do grading of students. Then around 2-3pm I take a nap. I think I sleep about 6 hours in 24 but broken up. And there is biphasic sleep as well--https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep
Supposedly there is some evidence for this? Some historian claimed there were “2 sleeps” - or three - as people went to bed so much earlier with only candles, then maybe got up in the night to check their animals or do medieval person tasks, and eat something - then sleep more? But then I think someone else maybe debunked that. But apparently the words “during the second sleep” appear in the records in relation to when eg a crime was committed.
I too like to read in the night and find my attention is better, my mind quieter, and my eyes less strained - I can read for an hour in the middle of the night.
But only when husband is away.
ETA: Oh, sorry - I just saw your link to that very thing.
Yes, this has been my way this year… have become a recent insomniac due to a huge life shift and divorce etc. I have heard that about the biphasic sleep, common amongst some famous writers.
So now I am writing a play, so am testing this out with my new sleep patterns.
Very interesting! I think Benjamin Franklin slept this way too, so you are in good company!
In the study linked below, women took an astonishing 300 mg of melatonin per day for 4 months! The study notes, "The medications did not alter sleep-wake rhythms and were not complicated by any side-effects." Hard to find any drug better tolerated than that.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1727807/
That is some solid evidence! Thanks for the link!
Fever is an example of a symptom I think you should not treat immediately, not until some point where sleep is now the thing most needed.
Good point. Fever helps to cook out the infection, so we should let it do its job, unpleasant as it is.
'It feels so good (Swimming in your stomach).'
My heart goes out to folks who have insomnia. I suffer very occasionally from insomnia, and I cannot imagine many more hellish things to face on a regular basis. I do suffer from a large amount of 'sleep inertia' (people that are awake, tend to stay awake; people that are asleep tend to stay asleep) and assorted other parasomnias - but those I can deal with.
I'm very drug-positive! I'll take anything that will help. But, I insist on having a decent estimate of the risks involved and the long-term implications. On the other side of the ledger is my wife, who needs to have a body part detached to justify a pain reliever. We've agreed to disagree on the topic.
Love the 'Jagged Little Pill' reference. For five years I drove an hour (one direction) to work. I generally listened to books to pass the time, but also had copies of 'Jagged Little Pill', 'Ella in Berlin' and 'Led Zeppelin II' for variety. I've listened to 'Jagged Little Pill' perhaps 75 to 100 times. Amazing album, amazing artist.
Whoo hoo! Another Morissette fan!
Your wife reminds me of my dad. He would just shrug off the craziest injuries he had incurred while building something, trimming the trees, or what have you. I think you and I are more sensible!
Your insomnia stories have always resonated with me. I'm "on the spectrum" at least, my regular routine seems to be on a 3-day cycle: good sleep -- no sleep -- some sleep -- good sleep ....
I think like you, it's been such a part of life since I can remember, and for a very long time I just assumed everyone was like that. Six minutes to fall asleep?! What the heck?
I don't usually get up or read or even turn on a light. I just start thinking... often about physics problems or some new topic of interest of mine. I try to avoid worrying about anything, although that sometimes can't be helped. Reconstructing old memories is also fun and passes the time.
But I do have a magic pill as well, for some reason ibuprofin will knock me out for a solid 4 hours of sleep. (But only at night, if I take it during the day it seems to have no effect. So maybe some similar mechanism to melatonin?) I don't take it very often, only if I'm particularly upset about something and know it will eat at me, or if I've got an early flight and need to be refreshed.
So interesting! Ibuprofen helps me fall asleep too, and like you, I don’t feel drowsy when I take it during the day. I wonder what the mechanism is?
And yes, I think a lot of the conversation about insomnia wrongly assumes that we’re lying awake worrying, when that is almost never the case for me, and it sounds like it isn’t for you either. We just have overactive brains and need a bit of pharmaceutical help to settle them down.
Mari, this is great info and perspective because I have suddenly (most of this year) become an insomniac and hope it is short lived. This week alone I had a night where I literally could not get tired enough mentally and did not sleep at all, but I assure you I was tired physically and it was a major day in San Francisco… but I effing laid there for so long, read, and was going crazy… part of that too was due to a recent bout of migraines. I think they are happening due to this issue though.
But I am one of those who will not take pills much, maybe believing the myths you mention and thinking they are bad for me. But that has been changing and I am going to try melatonin for sure. It is so hard not sleeping, and being semi tired so often.
Last night I did sleep well and wow what a difference, so am ready for a change, and a pill if that is needed.
I am so sorry you are going through this, James. Everything is harder when we can’t sleep. I hope melatonin works as well for you as it does for me.
I like this theme of not needing to suffer. I can't take HRT because my breast cancer was estrogen positive, so I've been suffering through menopausal symptoms and accepting it as a "new normal." Ugh. My Oncologist's PA just recommended acupuncture to me and it has given me such relief! We don't need to suffer. As you say, the cancer is suffering enough. For interested readers, I just wrote a column about this: https://www.cancernursingtoday.com/post/patients-with-breast-cancer-dont-have-to-live-with-pain
I am so glad to hear that acupuncture has been working for you! Thanks for the link to your column—I’m looking forward to reading it!
Menopause wasn’t all bad for me. For the first time I could wear short sleeves into the freezing cold grocery store in summer. It wasn’t freezing to me anymore. Some of that is weight gain, most likely. But I’m okay with that.
Once in awhile even though it’s years in the rear view, I’ll be getting dressed for something or other and have a little residual - “wait, do I need to carry a tampon (plus super pad, those final, endometrial years were so heavy!)”. And then I remember - oh yeah: no. A little like being ten again.
I have found it worthwhile to have at the ready a hair band and a little barrette for hot flashes. Helps to get hair off skin.
But all of this perhaps only barely makes up for the sadness of - oh, children aren’t a possibility anymore. That’s over. You had your shot.
Which for the great-grandmothers probably manifested as sweet relief.
Indeed! Life before birth control was hard for our foremothers. 8, 9, 10 or more kids. It’s hard to imagine.
I was looking at findagrave website in the course of a little local history reading, and noticing as was not wholly unusual (whooping cough? measles?) in the middle 19th century that one of our governors and his wife had the 11 children or whatever, of which three survived to adulthood, but seeing a list of all their DOBs and DODs really brought home how strange that for say 14 years, every two years you buried a child.
How awful. And this was a governor and his family, who presumably had better access to food and sanitation. Truly the best time in all of human history to be alive is right now.
OMG. I cannot imagine. I really can’t.
I’m the child of an alcoholic - and not a progressively-gets-sillier alcoholic - an angry drunk - and I’m trying to picture him taking this medication. First, he would have to have been open to talking about it (never did, though a copy of “The Road Less Traveled” traveled strategically around the house for years, as Mother pointedly moved it from spot to spot where Anyone Interested Might Pick It Up; years after we had all left home, Mother reported that he had abruptly quit drinking, without telling her why - “something happened?” - and he only fell off the wagon a few times, though she reported he remained a “dry drunk”, a term she heard somewhere, but I didn’t really need her to tell me that lol).
What puzzles me is - the drinking, the life directed toward his buddies, toward hitting the bar after the stock market closed - was part and parcel with his sheer hatred of/discomfort with family life.
He absolutely couldn’t bear to be around us. Mother said it was that way from the very start.
When he had to be home, it was a period of building tension which must end in a binge (which presumably kept him going, kept him working - kept us fed!).
One may be grateful, in hindsight, if grateful for existence, for getting to live on earth in a time of cats and other cool things - for the power of conformity that once compelled young persons to pair up, in college, and begin married life directly!
Maybe it’s a paucity of imagination but I can’t even think what would have replaced alcohol. Something would have had to - because coming home was never in the cards.
Alcohol was a solution. Or as Homer Simpson famously observed - “the cause of and solution to all problems”.
In re insomnia: at night I fall asleep easily, over a book in bed - but when I inevitably wake and mind starts turning, I count backwards from a thousand (by sevens is not boring enough!) or set myself a mind puzzle like Sam Beaver, on some nature question; all while doing something two friends once shared as if everyone knew about it: “relaxing your tongue”. In my case, I can’t figure out what relaxing your tongue means, but I try and sometimes just thinking about one’s tongue is boring and yet perplexing enough to be the last thing I think about before drifting off.
Oh, and “relaxing your tongue” is a thing from singing! My voice teachers always had to remind me to relax my tongue (not the tip—the back part, which extends into the throat). Maybe I will try it when the melatonin isn’t working!
Yep, my Dad too was an angry drunk until I was eight, than a dry drunk most of the time after. Now just half alive…
But I was lucky enough to learn from that myself. Robert Bly, the Author of Iron John, describes the image of men in bars as being prevalent for modern men due to emotional and spiritual isolation. This takes the place of how men from the past had “soul unions” that were a positive in their life, but no more… and I can speak from experience that there is a void for a high percentage of men. Men now gather for golf, bars of course, hunting, but not so much for spiritually intimate reasons.
I am so sorry about your dad, and I wish I had known when we were in high school so I could have been a better friend to you.
And I agree with Bly’s thesis in Iron John. The book was helpful for so many men when it came out.
It was amazing to me to grow up and discover that so many people can drink - nightly - and at social occasions a very great deal, and just get happier and more lively, or “suffused with a warm glow”.
There’s clearly a difference in brain chemistry with my father and perhaps yours, or there’s something deeper that they are “self-medicating” - but I wonder also if it might have something to do with drinking from a young age, from basically childhood, which I suspect is true of mine.
I agree that it is amazing anyone can sustain being a drunk for long, where I am now really rejecting the social aspect of drinking more than I have ever. I live in wine country, Sonoma… so it is everywhere you go, and most functions. I do drink, but it can really change the dynamic of the energy with people to the point of annoyance. So I am more careful in my choices of who to be with and what to do socially around drinking.
I am so sorry. It must have been devastating to realize such a terrible thing about your father. Naltrexone obviously wouldn’t have worked for him, because it sounds like he did have serious underlying problems. Every child deserves to have parents who love them to infinity and beyond, and I am so sorry you didn’t have that.
You know, at some point it’s like that show “This Was Us”. I mean, not the show per se, which I’ve not seen - but the title. You have to think hard about how much you would change, given that we all partake of the same DNA in varying percentages. I think of our funhouse reflection, my late maternal uncle and his wife and my cousins and their genuinely happy family, their shared vacations and pictures of 20 people in matching shirts at a lake house. I love that about them, family is everything - and yet - we are different and not just in our nuclear decay. Different intrinsically.
I used to feel sorry for my mother. But after sixty-four years of their marriage, observing 5/6 of it - I have a certain “we all make our beds” attitude towards her married life. The effect of my father’s failure as a dad on my brothers is all that is now left to cause any pain, because it will never change and they seem ultimately to have been more vulnerable than I.
Plus they had extra years with him, and now I’m worried he might even manage to outlive one of them!
People are living so long with chemistry 😜!
Glad the melatonin worked for you. I tried it a few weeks ago thinking it would help me not wake up in the middle of the night, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. I'd take the melatonin, sleep very very deeply for three hours, and then that was it, no more sleep for me.
Yikes—the exact opposite of what you were hoping to get from it. I hope you found another solution.
"It’s amazing how quickly Ozempic has joined kleenex, xerox, band-aid and other brand names that we use as generic terms"
It's not amazing.It's not even true.The only people who use Ozempic as a generic term are the people who don't know any better.
Literally, no one who is using a GLP1 drug for weight loss is taking ozempic. Go ahead and google GLP1 and look at the results.None of the sponsored search results will include ozempic. When you get down to the articles occasionally you will see the word ozempic. That is because the writers are often just like you. They have no idea what they are talking about.
The reason ozempic has maintained its status as the most inaccurate drug term ever popularized by the media is because most of the people who are talking about ozempic don't actually use it.
I know, I know you probably feel offended at my brusque tone, but seriously, you're writing an article about how people should respect the fact that drugs can help with issues and then you can't even get the name right? It's annoying.
Try GLP1, it's fewer letters to type, and you won't look like an idiot to anybody who knows better. Added plus: even the people who don't know better will know what you mean.Have that for a win.
That's the point. The kleenex on my shelf isn't by the Kleenex brand. The band-aids in my medicine cabinet aren't Band-Aid branded. Using a brand as a generic term means you call the product that even when it's not by the exact brand.
Kleenex is in fact the best-selling brand of tissue. Bandaids are in fact the best-selling brand of bandages. Ozempic is not the bestselling brand of GLP1 obesity meds.
But it's better than that, of course, because--and here's the point speaking from miles over your head--Ozempic isn't even an obesity medication.
“GLP1” wouldn’t have fit the rhythm of “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” in my subtitle.
Zepbound would have fit just fine. In fact, it would have scanned better. And unlike Ozempic, Zepbound actually is an obesity med.
My problem with melatonin is the nightmares. I've had scary dreams before, but only in melatonin dreams have I been stabbed and clawed.
The best thing that works for is marijuana edibles. The recommended doses are crazy, so I take either a quarter or half of a standard gummy.
I am so sorry about the nightmares! How horrible! I’m glad that marijuana gummies work for you.