Rant #2,468: Water Fall

This past weekend had a very rough beginning for myself and my family, but it apparently has worked itself out OK.

Briefly, my father took a fall out of bed on Friday night, and he could not get himself up off the floor. He fell in such a way that he put a major gash in his ear.

911 was called, and he was rushed to the hospital, and then to another hospital, but right now, all appears to be fine with him. He did need 12 stitches in his ear, but otherwise, he is OK.

Although the second hospital did not know what caused this to happen, clues which I won't get into now point to his not being hydrated enough, and it affected his entire body from top to bottom. Once he became hydrated, he was pretty much his old self.

He will be 88 in just a few days, and happily, he is home and appears to be OK, but it did give us quite a scare from Friday night and into Saturday morning.

The problem is my father absolutely hates to drink water. He prefers soda--me too--but he was not hydrated when this all happened, as he went from breakfast to dinner hardly ingesting anything, whether solid or liquid.

He has been given the option of drinking seltzer, which he likes, but he complains that it is "not the real seltzer," and while he is right--the real seltzer that he enjoys comes out of those pressurized bottles of yore--the current seltzer is going to have to do.

I hate to drink water too--I so much prefer soda, and for that matter, I have always been a very large milk drinker, too--but due to trial and error, I have found that I, too, need to have water in my system each and every day. So, for the past several years, I have had water and seltzer each day to satisfy that need, and since I am home now for the foreseeable future, I go with seltzer, because I simply like it better. I only have soda with lunch and dinner, and then I am back to seltzer.

And of course with breakfast, I continue to drink milk no matter what I am having for the first meal of the day.

I remember that as a child, my doctor told my mother that since I was such a huge milk drinker, that even if I was an active kid--which I was--I would probably never break a bone in my body, because of drinking so much milk--it made my bones so much stronger.

And the doctor proved to be prophetic, as in my 62 years of business, I have never broken a bone, even when I was active sportswise. This includes episodes where I got hit in the mouth with a ball, slid into a heavy-set catcher head first (I was probably mildly concussed, but that is another story for another time), and various other situations where somehow, I never experienced any breaks.

But back to water ... people carry around water bottles today like babies carry around bottles of formula. There is no shame in having a bottle of water--or seltzer--wherever you go, and it is almost fashionable to do so.

We have tried to convince my father that this is so, but even if the water or seltzer bottle is in front of him, he avoids drinking its contents. He has to be told to drink it, which is not a good situation.

I personally believe that this all stems from the fact that when he was first diagnosed with an ulcer more than 50 years ago, the regimen for combatting it at that time was to drink water, and only water, which he did for many years until the regimen changed, and someone with an ulcer would literally be tasked to try different things to see if they could handle them.

That is how my father got into soda, because he was so thoroughly sick of drinking water that he craved an alternative, and it was Diet Pepsi, no caffeine, which he can drink more than any other person I have ever seen.

Even in my days of heavy soda drinking, he could drink me under the table in comparison.

So now, he is back to water drinking--with occasional soda drinking--and he hates it.

But at nearly 88 years of age, he needs to understand that his body needs water--or seltzer--more than ever, and he must drink as much as he can to stay healthy.

He has to learn to at least put up with drinking water--or seltzer--and let me tell you, it is a real hard sell.