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

[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).