CJ the Curmudgeon

[cjsmith]

I'm beginning to lose patience with a certain category of people. Oh, I'm not proactively rude, but I no longer accept some pronouncements unquestioned.

"I can't swallow pills," someone said to me once. Well, I carefully didn't say, you better not live to be much older. (NB: This person had no dramatic anatomical weirdness. She could swallow food and drink.) Seriously, who lives to middle age without learning to cope with swallowing pills? Heck, who gets to COLLEGE age and hasn't learned to cope with that one? I felt like she was bragging that she was still five years old inside, and a spoiled five at that.

I remember a recent comment in a friend's journal about not dealing well with needles. I can relate. I used to faint -- no kidding here, FAINT -- at the sight of needles in use. I now inject myself daily. I don't LIKE it, don't get me wrong, but I DO it. There are certain special-snowflake attributes that I simply no longer have the luxury of keeping.

"Restrictive diets don't work for me," said a coworker of mine at lunch today, referring to what I don't eat on the Lyme/antibiotic/yeast-control diet. And this time, I spoke up.

"They don't?" I said. Like you're so special, I didn't say, that if you got this disease you would somehow be above managing it. "What if you knew that eating ice cream would make you pretty sick?" I asked instead. "What if you knew it would land you in the hospital, what then? Where's the line?"

He readily rephrased, saying he has no strong motivation to lose weight; I agreed that I could totally understand that, and we rambled off on side topics.

I think I'm beginning to see that in some cases, "special snowflake" translates to "I've been very lucky in certain ways and I take it for granted." I don't have nearly as much patience with that as I once had.

Bad me, for having little patience? Maybe, but y'know, I'm not at all sure of that.

Comments

[mapache]

Well, I've yet to figure out how the hell other people manage to swallow pills. My throat seems very adamant about not admitting anything that has been not chewed. I keep trying every few years, with the result always being either swallowing a glass or two of water and still having an increasingly-soggy pill in my mouth, or the occasional pill hacked out at high velocity. Thus, I find out if there is some kind of magical time delay thing going on, have yet to see the answer be yes, and just chew the damn things.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh yuck! Some of those things taste NASTY when chewed. Diphenhydramine, for example. *shudder*

I find that if I get a pill far enough back in my throat with -- this is key -- a big enough gulp of liquid, it works best. But then, I'm totally happy scarfing down big swallows of stuff. I think my throat just (metaphorically) throws up its hands and says "we'll let the stomach try to deal with THIS mess." And now my efforts to visualize this image are making my brain segfault. :-)

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I myself have problems with some pills going down. Even with a big gulp of water they tend to stick in my throat, dissolving slowly. However, I found a simple solution to that problem: have a bite of food to eat, and the pill will be carried down.

[mapache]

Yeah, the solution to the vile taste is to have a mouth full of water and to only lightly crunch the pill into smaller bits (as opposed to chewing into paste). The water isolates the crud from your taste buds and dilutes it, and avoiding excessive pressure keeps bits of it from getting stuck in the pits of your molars (which will then be in your mouth generating nasty, instead of in your stomach generating medication). If pills were like a quarter the size of a typical Advil or Tylenol, I'd have it down no problem.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Chewing can be bad for you. If it's a time-release medication, breaking it up so it dissolves faster can have unfortunate effects. (Ibuprofen you're probably safe with, though.)

Me, I'm okay with anything up to about Advil size, but larger than that and I get the That's Not Food And It's Not Coming In Here reaction. Water is unhelpful while swallowing, but nice to have afterwards. I buy chewable vitamins, when I buy vitamins, since vitamins are for some reason only produced in size Enormous whether they're meant to be chewed or not.

[ame-chan.livejournal.com]

Em takes a gulp of liquid, then inserts the pill and swallows both down, then gulps more liquid.

We have had LOTS of practice taking pills lately. *sigh*

[brooksmoses]

Argh, indeed. Perhaps we need to average out; I mostly just swallow them dry -- well, okay, with a little bit of saliva for lubricant. (This rather disturbs suzimoses if she sees me doing it.)

Actually, I wonder if that might help, if you haven't tried that. I have problems when I have too much water, as the pills seem to never be in the part of the gulp of water that gets swallowed.

(Oh, and right; I forgot my vitamins this morning. Should take those. They seem to help a little against depression, though not nearly so much as they do lilairen. [Extreme sensitivity to lack of B vitamins, she has.])

[zarex.livejournal.com]

I'm like that too, at least now; I get a lot of practice swallowing big gelcaps and such filled with protein supplements and such. But years ago, forget it. Now I can take 'em dry.

I used to have a roommate that had to chew up his pills. Ugh, I could barely watch him do that.

Also, inflectionpoint said pretty much what I was going to. :)

pills that don't go down with water

[moriamerri.livejournal.com]

(I seem to be having trouble getting my comments under the comment I'm commenting on. This is in reply to what brooksmoses said.)

If you haven't tried this, give a whirl to tipping your head FORWARD for capsules (and BACK for solid pills). I'm not sure about putting water in mouth first vs putting pill in first -- but I'd bet some experimenting along that line, too, could be useful.

The tipping head forward vs back has been quite helpful to me in getting pills swallowed and without discomfort (mostly).

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

ps: And now I feel really bad for being so insulting up there in paragraph two. I apologize! :-( That gal gave me the impression she hadn't much bothered to try, but that was an impression; I admit I totally judged without knowing.

[moriamerri.livejournal.com]

If you are interested, write to me (I think LJ can forward to me?) and ask about methods for learning to swallow pills. I have some collected notes on this subject written by parents of autistic kids who have used various methods. There are different approaches. One that seems sorta popular is to start with TEENY things and swallow them for a good long while and VERY SLOWLY increase size. Then again, maybe this is all more to the same, and won't work for you.

I'm a bit "special" on the pill thing -- I can swallow them but it took me YEARS and YEARS to do it without a lot of care. I still have to think about it once in a while. (Note: for capsules, tilt head forward, for pills tilt head back.) And I still REALLY don't like big pills. Will go out of my way to find smaller version, because the big honking pills are adequately unpleasant that I have to be REEEALLY motivated to take 'em.

[inflectionpoint.livejournal.com]

Applesauce can help.
Some folks, strangely enough, find that a bite of bread or something helps.
Big swigs of water are good too.

Try different things to see what helps, good luck with it.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

I find that something really thick and creamy taken at the same time helps. I use Ensure, which I drink for breakfast anyway. I could imagine a thick milkshake would also help. But water or juice or anything with a low viscosity it about as good as using nothing.