COULDA, SHOULDA, WOULDA

Things We Might Have Done Differently

I have few regrets but these might count that way

ChatGPT 4 from my prompt

I’ve often said that I have few regrets but today I thought of some that may be classified that way.

One of them is the pain killers my wife’s doctors have her dependent on. If I remember correctly, the first prescription was for Celebrex, which has some nasty side effects. She was switched from that to Gabapentin, which has its own set of side effects and also seems to make most people incapable of thinking clearly — we called it the “Make Me Stupid” drug.

From that she switched to Tramadol, which did not seem to affect her adversely for quite a few years but eventually caused difficult constipation and has been clouding her once extremely sharp mind as well.

If we could have looked into our future, would we have decided to fight arthritis with exercise and meditation? I don’t know. I usually find it easy to ignore pain, but my wife does not. Could she have learned? We are trying to cut back the Tramadol now, skipping her lunchtime dose every three days. We’ll do that for a month and then drop it every other day. After that month, we’ll try to get to two lunchtimes a week, then one, then none. Will we be able to continue by starting over with the breakfast dose? We don’t know, but that’s the goal.

Another thing we wish we hadn’t done is downsize to a home with forced hot air heat. When we bought our first home in 1973, one of the first things we did was replace the forced hot air with radiators. How could we forget why we did that? The noise, the super dry air, the dust blowing up from where it settles in the registers, the initial blast of very cold air? Who wants that? We could afford that conversion in 1973 but it’s not in our budget today.

While thinking about downsizing, why on earth (literally) did we move from an elevation of 300 feet above sea level to less than 100? I knew about global warming, why didn’t I think about flooding? We aren’t in an official flood zone where we live, but a little stream runs through the woods behind us. When I looked out into those woods after several days of heavy rain recently, I noticed a miniature lake, probably 15 ft. by 20, that has never been…