Blood's thicker than vodka

I had to have a chortle to myself today when I discovered that I'm taking a performance enhancing drug. The joke is, well if you saw me with a tennis racquet or watched me run you would know. Anyway EPO or erythropoetin is a substance normally produced in the kidneys that tells the bone marrow to make more red blood cells. In kidney failure you don't produce the EPO so you get anaemic.

Those little blighters do far more than just make you pee - they control your blood pressure and they also have a complicated relationship with your parathyroid gland in your neck which controls how much calclium is stored in your bones.

Apparently some "professional" athletes take EPO to boost their blood count in order to get more oxygen in order to enhance their performance. Sounds fair, but they run the danger of thickening their blood so much that it clogs up their heart. Little danger of me getting like that - I can never get my Hb over 12 which is at the lower end of normal.

The only performance enhancer I need is Smirnoff & diet tonic with freshly squeezed lime - funny how it makes me believe I could write for a living.