I am an upstanding teacher. I am morally upstanding, but I am also over six feet tall. My hair is not quite as red as it used to be, but still, I am told I can be rather imposing.

I shrunk in front of the otolaryngologist as he glared at my one liter of Diet Coke.

"How much do you drink a day?" he said. "How many of those bad boys?"

Now, I have long appreciated caffeine, but I lost my taste for everyday coffee a while back. I like it; just in limited amounts. That must have been when I switched to Diet Coke. I like it too, in pretty much any amount. I have a taste for Diet Pepsi Twist too, but the market wasn't good for it in Indiana, so I can only get it on trips. I will drink my last bottle tomorrow.

I told the man the truth. I probably drink three liters of liquid a day, and most of it is Diet Coke. Sometimes I drink more. I used to drink water too, back in Ohio, but I don't really like Indiana water. And some or all of the medicines that I take for my rheumatoid arthritis did a number on my taste buds, so I like to drink something I can taste. Diet Coke. Preferably with lime.

The doctor glared at me again. "What?" he bellowed. Maybe he didn't bellow, but he looked awfully big from that chair and I felt awfully small.

He went to the door and called two nurses to the room. "There," he said as he pointed to my Coke. "She drink three or more of those bad boys a day!" The nurses tsked and shook their heads at me.

The doctor proceeded to tell me that, although I probably was helping Coke stay in business, I wasn't doing my body any favors. Truth be told, I already knew that. I have, at times decaffeinated myself over the summer. I thought maybe when I turned fifty, I would do something about it. That wasn't so long ago (eleven days, to be exact.) The thing that held me back was that I NEED my caffeine. From somewhere. And that is what I told the doctor, but he showed me no mercy.

"You," he said, "are a caffeine abuser!"

Me? Upstanding citizen that I am? Defiantly I thought that, if I am, so are fifty million other people. Besides, it is easier to think of caffeine abuse in relation to the office coffee pot or Starbucks. The doctor, however, would not relent.

He told me that he saw signs of dehydration in my body, despite the fact that I was on my third one liter of Diet Coke for the day. That, he said, was bad because it made my mucus really thick. He gave me a pamphlet on post-nasal drip that is really sort of disgusting except that it said you probably wouldn't notice it if it were thin enough. Which mine was not.

He didn't think the allergy treatment I had received over the years was correct, either, so he started me on a medicine for non-allergic vasomotor rhinitis. The symptoms are pretty much the same as allergies, but in this case it means my immune system is hyper-sensitive to certain pollutants. Duh! I have rheumatoid arthritis! My immune system is hyper-sensitive to my own body! I'm not sure it would know something that it should attack!

Anyway, I now join the realms of people who have high frequency hearing loss. This is about the age where such loss may start to show up, and in my case it may be aggravated by two of the medicines I take for my RA: plaquinel and methotrexate. It may be aggravated by the RA itself. In either case, I do not want it to get worse.

So. Today I drank my next to last bottle of Diet Pepsi Twist. Then two half liters of water. Then a cappucino when I met my husband for lunch, but he forgot about my needing to change. And then a liter of water. I don't have a headache from lack of caffeine.

I think I'm making progress.

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