CAFFEINATED CONSEQUENCES

It's 3:55AM.

I used to be one of those people with more diet soda in their veins than blood. "Used to be" indicates that such was and is no longer the case. And it isn't. About a year ago I stopped buying diet soda at the grocery store, quit asking waitresses for "whatever diet you've got" when asked what I'd selected to slurp, and no longer made gas stations a regular pit stop for anything but auto fuel. My skin got better. I had to pee less frequently. Water became more potent.

What I mean by water increasing its potency: When tired, when really dragging, rather than sucking diet soda, I now turn to actual hydration to get me through. You'd be surprised how effective it is.

I travel a lot (too much), and because I live in the Reno area I am always slapped with an early, early initial flight taking me to whatever airport actually flies direct to my destination--even if my destination is no further than San Diego or Irvine.

When I have to arise at 3AM to be on time for my departure when I whacked the feathers only three hours before (I am an imbecile when it comes to meetings; I procrastinate the prework I have to execute and then find myself up cramming almost all of the night before), the fatigue is incredible. Caffeine seems like a reasonable boost for such situations, but--believe it or not--for my body, it's not necessary. A Clif bar and proper hydration when I get past security and can snag a liter of water does the trick. I learned that caffeine isn't the silver bullet I thought it was and was an unnecessary commodity in my day to day.

However, I like diet soda. I'm aware that, for a of myriad reasons, it's absolutely no good for the body I try to keep healthy, but I figure an inappropriate consumption of whatever suits me here and there isn't going to kill me quite yet. So over the last month I've had a couple diet sodas. Not in restaurants. Not purchased for the house. Not in a way that's going to reenter my existence as a vice. Just a couple here and theres.

Last night was one of the here and theres. Yesterday morning, The Husband went far beyond the call of marriage and labored in my storage unit. (No, not our storage unit. Mine. For work. It houses all my samples, clinical study reprints, patient education, drug trays, etc.--it's a climate controlled place to house my work paraphernalia. Most drug reps have one.) Up until yesterday morning my storage unit was a pit. It still contained a mountain of trash from the job I left six months ago, segregated from tidy stacks of my new job's samples plus box upon box of clinical reprints that I swear weigh 50 lbs. each.

The Husband ferried gorilla racks to my unit, donned his work gloves, assembled the racks, and hauled all the trash to his car for dumpster-deposit while I slogged through my monthly sample inventory and separated out all the clinicals by product on my new racks. Because spending time in my storage unit invariably leaves me looking like I army crawled through a dusty attic and I was clad in the day's worth clothes, I brought an apron to keep my dress tidy and had to opt out of the box-hugging task of relocating the mountain of junk to The Husband's car.

That means Mr. Megan had to do it all. And though I can often do a bang-up job with description, I can't be any sort of accurate in trying to explain just how much heavy refuse was stacked in my storage unit, so saying that it took the man (who is significantly stronger than he looks) 35 minutes of constant carrying and box breakdown is going to have to do.

When my racks were assembled, samples were inventoried, the day's materials gathered, and my hands filthy, it was time to head out into the wild and make productive contact with my docs. By that time, The Husband had completed the clean up and had earned himself a sweat. For me.

He sweat and slaved for me. It's not like that's unusual--I told you just this last Tuesday that he lives and loves to serve me, but it made me awfully grateful nonetheless. He did for me what I really didn't want to do, did it on his day off, and offered to help without my asking. So, although my day was long, my feet hurt, and I just wanted to crash when I got home from work last evening, when I arrived at our 'lil residence after the workday was through and located my spouse, I told the man that to thank him for his incredible help I wanted to take him to dinner wherever he'd like to go. (The significance of "wherever he'd like to go" is that I am an incredibly finicky eater and as he is as accommodating as I am finicky we rarely end up at his first-choice restaurants.)

If you live in the nether regions of Sparks as we do, you're 20 minutes from the freeway and getting to whatever out-to-dinner place you've selected is a noteworthy time commitment. Thus we spent the next 10 minutes brainstorming ideas of where he wanted to go. That one's too far. What's even around here? That food isn't even good. How far do you actually want to go? I'm sick of that. That one's way far too. We should stay around here. It isn't worth the drive. I went there earlier this week.

In the end, The Husband, even more tired than I and not keen on making our way across town for an evening out, said that rather than dinner he just wanted a giant diet soda and an ice cream cone. His choice, so I went along. I had one of the few diet sodas I've had in the recent past. A hefty one. So, wide-eyed, wired, and too mentally fatigued to be productive, I'm here to say that when you don't drink the stuff any kind of regularly and the tolerance you'd developed when it was a daily staple has dissolved, caffeine really punches you with the energizing ka-pow! it's rumored to possess.

Therefore sleep is not an option. Late last evening I [unwisely] had a big, fat diet soda and now, at nearly 4AM, a snooze is nothing more than a fairytale.

UPDATE: It's now 8:20AM and I've still not discovered slumber. Good thing I've no obligations to keep me from falling asleep sometime today. I hope.