You don't have to go completely dry.
It was the first and last time I’d see the doctor who was standing over me wielding a clipboard. She was an internist, referred to me by a friend, and I was there for my “annual” physical, though it had been a while. I liked her. Initially. She had a nice manner—confident, caring, efficient. I made a mental note to maybe buy a pair of clogs like the ones she was wearing.
The doctor peeked over tortoise-rimmed glasses and checked me out as if for the first time. “Why?” she asked. And cocktail hour wasn’t only about escape. It became a treasured ritual—albeit one that came with more than a few groggy mornings. In the summer, on vacation in Rhode Island, we drank Dark and Stormies overlooking the Atlantic; we sipped Manhattans as soon as the leaves fell in New York. We rejoiced when a friend dropped off a bushel of cucumbers from her summer garden—all the better to try our hand at a ginger-cucumber gin drink we loved at a local bar.
"If you’re only having one drink a night, that’s not anything to worry about," she said. "But you should know that a lot of health risks are associated with chronic alcohol consumption,” rattling off a list that I could tell she’d recited often: cirrhosis, heart disease, certain cancers, dementia, high blood pressure. Oddly, those seemed like abstract, faraway risks compared to what she said next. “Something else you might want to consider,” she said.
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