What I Did Today - Wednesday, January 2, 2008

1. After a glorious week off, I awoke at 5:30, before the alarm went off, on this, my first day back at work.
2. I made myself a terrific breakfast: a toasted sesame bagel with chive cream cheese, lox, red onion and caper, washed down with freshly squeezed orange juice;
3. I worked 10 straight hours, but when I left tonight, all my cases were current;
4. I came home and warmed up the last of the beef bourguignon which I enjoyed while watching Law & Order and vegging out in the gameroom;
5. I did a little online research on the newly popular for aging baby boomers (of which I'm one) oral bisphosphonates for prevention of osteoporosis. Bisphosphonates have a fascinating history; they were discovered in the middle of the 19th century and have been used industrially since that time as water softeners, due to their ability to inhibit calcium carbonate formation. I have more than a passing interest in this nerdy topic because last week my doctor prescribed a bisphosphonate for me, and this in spite of the fact that I don't have osteoporosis. Sally Field is currently touting one of these drugs on television, but despite her sunny demeanor, these are powerful drugs that no one should consider taking without doing your homework. For example, the reason the dosing is just once a month is that although bisphosphonates leave the blood in several hours, their half-life in the skeleton is estimated to be at the very least, years, and perhaps lifelong, information I gleaned from a manufacturer's website, where I also learned that 20 to 50 percent of any given dose is taken up by the skeleton. FYI, the biological half-life of a drug is the time required for half of that drug to leave your body by either a physical or a chemical process. So in plain English, if a drug has a half-life of many years in your skeleton, that means that for all practical purposes, whatever percentage of the drug is absorbed by your skeleton just stays there, and the amount is increased with each subsequent dose. No one knows the long term effects of taking these drugs orally, but coincidentally, they're are also the class of drugs associated with osteonecrosis of the jaw, a rare but incurable condition in which the jaw bone dies. Needless to say, I have decided this is yet another prescription that I'll do without. And I'll be doctor hunting soon, because I'm getting more than a little tired of Dr. Polypharmacy blithely writing yet another script each time I so much as yawn in her office...