Pill Taking

For me taking pills is the same as a submission to the animal.  I can take most even without liquid but for me it is the same as paying penance to the ultimate evil within me.  My Mom hated to take pills.  Mom smoked Winston cigarettes until I was well into my twenties I think.  I suppose she started around 14 or 15 but never asked.  While she had many health issues in her life she detested taking pills.  I never understood.  In her final years my Sister had to monitor her daily and finally gave up deciding she was old enough to decide what she would take.  Mom had a long stick of 7 labeled days and under the lid of each day was the pills for that day, and it was doubled on the other side for nights.  It sat on her stove and I would look when I dropped in on her and in her last couple of years I rarely discovered that she was taking her pills.  She took them when she felt bad, but she did not feel bad enough most of the time.  Perhaps I inherited this revulsion for pills.

I only take three pills so I understand I am bitching about something that is very minor.  One is a maintenance cholesterol pill.  What a joke, here I am stage aw sh.. and we worry about my cholesterol.  One is gab, as I call it.  This is 3 times a day for my feet and one is pain, 5mg dose, 3-5 times a day for the past couple of weeks.  In the morning I get a little in my stomach, typically something toasted.  With total resignation I go to my designated pill storage area in the kitchen.  I do this with the full knowledge that I will suffer some consequences physically and emotionally in what I am about to do.  Like a fly being drawn to the light, the addict.  I get about 8 oz of water, take a swig, lay out the gap and cholesterol in the morning, take a swig, open the cabinet pull down the pain pills, lay one out and take a swig, then take each individually with a swig.  The process is repeated two more times each day, seven days a week, less the cholesterol tab.  This is one of those things that can take me completely down and out in a spiral.  I fight the urge to boil over in anger and break into obscenities too frequently when it comes time to take the pills. Saying that here helps me focus these emotions like a laser to the tumor.  The fight includes the discipline to take the pills.  It is part of being a big boy and acting like a grown up.  While the animal is the cause of the most unpleasant medications, to lapse in application guarantees my suffering is compounded and is for me saying ok animal, you beat me.  I’m not ready to concede that yet.