Remedial

Did you know that if you drink plenty of water every day you'll sleep through the night? It's safe, and it's natural, and it works for babies as well as adults! Of course, that "plenty" may be a difficult measure to gauge, and it's entirely possible that there is no actual correlation between drinking water and sleeping, but I'm pretty sure that if you're dying of thirst you'll probably have a hard time sleeping. Until you pass out or expire.
And so the process continues finding a way to live better through Al Gore's Internet. My recent bout with kidney stones, the one where I was oh-for-two last week, had my wife and I scouring our online resources for answers. The problem is that once you open the door just a little bit, the information flood begins. Do this, don't do that, can't you read the signs? It's a pretty frustrating thing to feel like I am living a healthy lifestyle, getting plenty of exercise, and taking my vitamins but still I found myself in this medical crisis that involved emergency rooms and blood tests and pain medications and all sorts of extra attention for which I didn't recall asking.
And so I ended up with a puzzle. The visit with my doctor didn't solve it. There were all kinds of loose ends. The good news was that my continued vigilant awareness of what goes into and out of my body would certainly help. Having lost twenty or more pounds over the past year gave me another gold star, but also made me all the more curious: With all this health consciousness, why am I still sick?
Well, it could be that I am of a certain age. It could also have something to do with my profession and the stresses related to it. It might be that the combinations of the bad things I have done to my body in the past, even though I have become much better-behaved, have created this ongoing issue. That's where Al Gore's Internet comes into play. How can I stop being whatever it is that I am in order to be what I want to be? If you Google the right combination of terms, you can almost always find someone or some entity that will support that world view. There is no one right answer. Just endless links to other web pages that will let you know how to feel better in ways you might never have expected. Or maybe you did, since you went looking for it in the first place.
So I'll keep drinking plenty of water, and I'll do my best to avoid all those things that bring on premature aging and heartbreak, or heart attack. Maybe then I'll be able to sleep through the night.