"During whatever time you have left, if you enjoy iced tea, so do I. Because of sleep apnea, my tea is decaffeinated, and I use stevia to sweeten it, a natural alternative to sugar which has also been linked to kidney stones. I counteract the risk of kidney stone formation by adding lemon juice and lemons to my iced tea for the citric acid content to prevent kidney stone formation.
The water I drink now always has a splash of lemon juice, lime juice, cranberry juice concentrate, or a combination of those additives. I also sometimes have yogurt with cranberry juice, lemon juice or lime juice added, and Syrians in my family frequently use a lemon juice/olive oil marinade for recipes like fresh cabbage salad, and a blend of vinegars is my alternative marinade for cabbage salad, since I don't like the taste of cabbage, but am fine with apple cider vinegar flavoring, balsamic vinegar flavoring or lemon flavoring. (Interestingly, nobody on my Syrian side of the family has ever suffered a kidney stone that we know of.)" After my first run-in with kidney stones, I was given a list of foods/liquids to remove from my diet and, because of this, I no longer drink tea. (Ha - later I was told that I should ignore the list because it would make me deficient in certain nutrients.). In any case, now I have a cup of tea (always with lemon), every once in a long while. Lemons, IMO, are wonderful. I used to freeze the whole lemon and grate it into/onto everything. Same with vinegar, malt and balsamic in particular, if not for the acidity, I could probably drink vinegar from the bottle. :)
"Pharmacists in my experience are delighted to be utilized for free consults during quiet times like overnight hours, are easy to locate outside one's own area of residency, and anonymity is no difficulty at all, particularly when conversing at a pharmacy where there is a high employee turnover rate.
I have jovially asked, "Given all the pharmaceuticals you have here, would hemlock be your first choice for dispatching yourself if you were Socrates?" With the right pharmacist, this can trigger the sort of entertaining and informative academic dialogue reminiscent of James Stewart's professor Rupert Cadell in Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 classic "Rope." (The mention of poison hemlock with respect to Socrates is the ice breaker here, as even in the UK islands, there is no potential for any government authority to block free citizen access to wild growing hemlock roots, so whether or not the conversationalists are looking for ways to commit suicide is merely academic at that point. The only prevention for suicide with that knowledge being possessed is to cure whatever condition is causing the suicidal ideation, whether it be liver cancer, brain cancer, pancreatic cancer, aging, arthritis, depression, freckles, excess height, dwarfism, any sort of pain, and so on.)" This is brilliant!!!!! Where I live, if I were to be sanctioned because of this, it would never hold up in a court of law. Here one has to say "I am going to permanently harm myself." I have an acquaintance who never said a word, but his actions spoke volumes that he had every intention of committing suicide. We were told that there was nothing that the law could do.
"Maybe in the paranoid world of 2020, such a discussion might be considered and reported upon as suspicious, since differences are now criminalized and aggressively prosecuted instead of extolled (hence the guarantee of modern civilization racing backwards into the dark ages again, as will quickly happen when the next pathogen after COVID is the updated equivalent of the 1918 flu, a pandemic which quickly kills billions through modern jet transportation instead of over 50 million through much slower steam liner travel), but I have already long since enjoyed most of the necessary conversations to acquire all the knowledge I need to successfully CTB on my first attempt." I see so much forward thinking in the world today - such as the trends being set in Oregon - and at the same time, see a ton of backwards thinking or just plain old refusal to consider the view points of others - dogmatic thinking. It does scare me for the future of the younger generations.
<3
