MEDICINE
Commercials for prescription drugs seem to make up the majority of commercials on TV these days. The list of side effects on many of these drugs is long and sometimes, ominous. I wonder who’d actually take a chance on medication with side-effects like blindness or having a body part drop off. And some of the warnings make no sense —like sleeping medication that states “drowsiness” as a side effect. Well, duh.
I’m very disappointed with Western medicine. Why can’t doctors be more like the ones on TV when I was growing up? Marcus Welby, M.D., was always kind, never in a hurry, and never made mistakes. He’d never diagnose a cramp in my side as appendicitis. He wouldn’t ignore my concerns that my cold had turned into pneumonia (which it did). And he’d never have his assistant’s assistant attend to me while he stared at a computer screen.
I thought seeing a female doctor would make a difference. And it did. The woman doctor touched me with hands that must been have refrigerated. I nearly fell off the examination table from shock. She asked me if I was always so jumpy — like it was abnormal to want to avoid deathly-cold hands on one’s private parts. Nor was she particularly gentle in her examination. I left the office feeling like I’d been groped. So give me a male doctor with a cold stethoscope and warm hands any day.
Medicines have come a long way from the folk remedies available in earlier times. But we still use one in my household. It’s Drambuie, a Scottish liqueur made from malt whiskey, heather honey and herbs. The liqueur is our family cure-all for any complaint imaginable, and even if one has no complaints. I carry a mini-bottle in my purse for emergencies. Does your back hurt? Have a couple of Kilt-lifters (a Drambuie and lime-juice concoction). You have a cut on your leg? Pour some Drambuie on it. The baby is teething? Rub a little Drambuie on the kid’s gums — it shuts him right up.
Why is it the cheaper the prescription medicine, the bigger the pill? There must be something about saving money on generics that dictates a horse-pill sized medication. Also, the pills are chalky, with no coating to make swallowing them any easier.
I have trouble swallowing pills anyway. These super-sized ones are nearly impossible to get down. Even when I cut one in half (and don’t lose the other half in the toilet bowl) I’m still left with pills too large to swallow without a milkshake chaser or loaf of bread.
Sometimes, preparing for a medical procedure is worse than actually going through it. Personally, I’d do anything to avoid the prep for a colonoscopy. I never knew my body harbored so much excrement until I had to flush it all out. I will forever associate lemon-lime flavoring with the buckets of liquid laxative I took to accomplish this. At least the constant outflow and trips to the bathroom made me swear off food for weeks afterward.
As an alternative, I could’ve swallowed a small camera to take pictures of my gut en route. I suspect this would only make things easier for the doctors. They’d just wait for the camera to do its shutter-bug duty and deliver the goods. I’d probably still have to endure the clean-out procedure though. With my luck, I’d flush the camera down the toilet, thinking I’d passed yet another stool. Or worse, the pictures would end up as a YouTube video with butt-joke captions.
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