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

[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*