So there I was, about a month ago, watching TV on a Friday afternoon. All perfectly normal. Until I tried to stand up! Then I discovered my legs didn’t work.

I rolled into a kneeling position in front of the couch and from there I was able to straighten my legs and stand up. I was even able to hobble into the kitchen. But I was really unsteady on my feet, so after debating for a while I called 911, and half an hour later I was in the ER—where, of course, things returned to normal as they tested. Couldn’t really find anything wrong, and I was able to walk normally when they sent me home just before midnight.

Everything seemed okay, until about four days later, when I felt something very like the same thing—“the same but different,” as I told the doctors back in the ER.

They ran some more tests and found I was dangerously low on potassium. Almost lethally low!

Short version, they put me on a potassium drip, and transferred me to a private room. What followed was among the worst three days of my life, as they kept coming in every two hours to draw blood. Lots of specialist wandered thru. Finally they got my potassium to within .1 of what they felt it should be. On the afternoon of the third day they decided to send me home, with an appointment to see a nefrologist a few days later.

There she took more blood, and she asked me what I was eating. She rattled off a list of problem foods, and the last was licorice. Yes, I said, in the last few months I had felt a taste for licorice (a childhood favorite), and had been indulging myself a bit. Tho not excessively. “It doesn’t take much,” she said.

It seems licorice tricks the body into thinking it has too much potassium, so it starts flushing it out. Ain’t Nature grand?

Well, as I said, that was all about a month ago, and now things have settled back to what passes for normal at my age.

So no more licorice. I told the doctor if she’d said chocolate I would have killed myself.