Bitter pill to swallow

If I remember right, a year ago at this time, the only meds I was putting in my body were the three Aleve tablets I took each morning.

While they were targeting my achy-breaky knees, they also made a great pre-emptive strike for the recurring headaches I was experiencing.

Now, a year removed from last May’s meltdown in the new local breakfast spot and continuing medical problems thereafter, I’m sucking down more than a dozen pills daily, and not a one of them is an Aleve.

I used to tease my mother when she started writing down a list of her pills each morning and crossing them off as she took each one so she wouldn’t forget. Apparently there wasn’t a mother’s little helper among them because when I suggested she might one day cross them all off and then forget that she’d made a list and start all over again, I caught H-E-double-hockey-sticks.

Yep, she sent a grown man to his room without supper that night.

Honestly I had never seen a person take so much medication until each of my doctor’s visits only added to my collection of meds. I literally keep a basket of them in the living room.

At one point I had pills for my headaches that came with the warning, “may cause headaches.” At least it didn’t indicate “oily discharge” or may cause constipation.

The sad thing is I’m not taking anything interesting like Prozac or anything else enlightening.

It’s just that I have been spending way too much time at the pharmacy these coronavirus days, trying to social distance at six feet and stay out of the adjacent aisle traffic. The problem is with all these new meds accompanying fun times like getting a stent put in my heart, battling gout flare-ups during physical therapy and contracting the grossest of gross diseases, C.diff, a couple months ago I’m at the pharmacy at least once a week.

I’ve been juggling what I take and when each is due for a refill so I could cut down on the trips to the pharmacy, but the insurance company wouldn’t refill a prescription for me on Monday because it didn’t run out until Wednesday.

You know, I never really thought about all the medications I was taking these days until I knocked the two plastic pill caddies that I was filling with weekly doses off my coffee table.

Pills rolled here, there and halfway to Fillmore, some finding their way into the fireplace, down the heat register and up against the baseboard.

Thought I had them all cleaned up when I spotted a lonely little white pill under the television stand in the corner.

What a chore, picking them all up, sorting them out and putting them in their respective bottles so I could start the pill caddy process all over again. But after that, that odd-shaped white pill still remained.

OK, I thought, just to even everything back up, I’ll take it.

But it was no mother’s little helper either, no relief for achy knees, no cure-all at all.

Nope, it was a Tic-Tac.

And thanks, I’m feeling better already …