B-12

No, it's not a bomber, it's a vitamin.

For about the last month I've been suffering from really severe leg cramps at night, the kind that make you get up in the middle of the night and walk around the bedroom, the kind that leave your legs acutely sore the next day, the kind that make you emit all sorts of spectacularly blue language when they start up, usually within thirty minutes of lying down, and lasting until it's time to get up in the morning.

A friend of my wife's suggested tonic water, which her husband drinks to control leg discomfort. So every night at bedtime I'd choke down a Schweppervescent bottle of said tonic water, spluttering at the quinine and throwing my metaphorical hands up into the air at my sad fate. The tonic water seemed to lessen my restless legs syndrome, but did nothing for the cramps. About the only thing it did for me was give me rich, resonant, basso profundo burps of magnificent volume - that tonic water is gassy stuff.

Then during a slow day at work I Googled "leg cramps" and found that the Mayo Clinic, of all things, reported that vitamin B-12 was one of only two substances proven to be of any value in leg cramps (the other one sounded suspiciously like rocket fuel formulations from the early 1960s, the days when they still mixed up stuff like Hydyne and Aerozine-50 and people actually knew what UDHM stood for). [Editor's Note: That would be UDMH, not UDHM, and in case you'e wondering, it is unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine.]

So I tried it. The first night my leg cramps were greatly reduced in duration and severity. The next night they were gone. Not better, gone. And they remain gone. Two B-12 tablets at bedtime and that, me buckos, is the length of its forty cubits. I'm usually a little suspicious of miracle cures, especially those offered up by supplements or herbal products. But this one is as good as gold.