Side Effects

Probably I mentioned that my one formal guitar lesson a couple years, the guy gave me a Chicago-style blues piece to learn. I got home, practiced it, and while I was doing it, kept thinking how familiar it sounded. 


Well, you know blues, you only got those three chords and the truth, so sure, lot of blues are going to sound alike.


Then I saw the Cialis commercial on TV with the old couple in side-by-side clawfoot bathtubs outside and realized that was the music I was learning.


Guitar teacher was either clueless, or had a wicked sense of humor ...


Recently I was watching the tube and the latest of these commercial came on, and there's that side-by-side-in-the-tubs thing, which has become the video logo, and it occurred to me just what a bad idea that was. 


Unless, of course, the water in the tubs was cold.


See, when you sit in a hot tub, the warmth relaxes both striated and smooth muscle, to a degree. Such as control your blood vessels. When your arteries and veins dilate as they are wont to do with the hot water, your blood pressure goes down. Simple enough to see why -- if you have a pump moving liquid through a closed system, you will have x-amount of pressure; if you switch out the hoses so they are slightly larger, but keep the same amount of fluid and the same power going into the pump, the pressure drops. 


This drop can be enough so that standing up quickly after a long soak in the hot tub will suddenly short-change your brain of the oxygenated blood it needs to stay conscious. If you don't sit or get your head down quick, you might well take a nose-dive onto the deck as you pass out. 


Been there. 


Cialis allows more blood flow to the penis. One of the side effects of this is to allow more blood flow elsewhere, i.e., relaxation of the vessels, which, as we saw in Chapter One of Things You Need to Know About Mr. Willie and Mr. Brain. Users are specifically warned against taking Cialis (Or Viagra) with nitrates, which are used to treat angina by dilating the constricted vessels to allow more blood flow. Such, they say, could cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. 


So, if you take your weenie-erector meds -- and far be it from me to gainsay that if you find them useful -- then go and plop yourself in the hot tub long enough to get nice and relaxed, when you stand up, even if you do so slowly and carefully you just might pass out cold. 


For the good folks at Cialis to be showing that kind of thing is an invitation to a lawsuit.