Most answered bottled water, long-life milk, food etc. The real answer was that if you are on medication, then that is your top priority.
Soon after I arrived in this tiny village I became friends with an elderly lady who didn’t drive. She asked me to pick up her medicine which was coming on the bus and would be left at the local store. I happily did and stayed on for a cuppa.
Needing one of the pills she opened the package and asked, “Elaine, has the doctor changed my heart pills? These have got Sat, Sun, etc on the pack.”
I checked and realised they were contraceptive pills sent out to a young lady with the same initials and surname, resulting in a very quick trip back to the store where I swapped the packets.
Beside my radio at home I have a basket of pills of which I take four each morning.
The most important is a big white pill almost like a tombstone – which is what I might be under if I don’t take it as it’s a blood pressure pill.
This is a really hard pill to get down even though I don’t have any tonsils. I even went down to the farm veterinary cabinet looking for the old pill pusher we used on the calves but luckily it was broken.
Then there’s a medium sized white pill also for blood pressure and supposedly good for the kidneys. No wonder I need almost half a litre of warm water just to get these two pills down. Then there is a pink heart-shaped one for keeping the blood thin, very effective when I get caught up on rose thorns.
I call the big white pill Papa Pill, medium one Mama Pill and the tiny cholesterol one Bubba
Pill although I could think of better words for the latter one. That comes in a small square pill bottle with horizontal arms making it impossible for me to remove the cap. Even the seven-year-old across the road can’t figure it out. So I drilled a hole in the lid making it large enough for all the pills to come out and I put them in another container.
I then choose to take a capsule called CQ10 (sounds like a cruise ship). It’s a brown, oval-shaped pill to fight off the side-effects of the cholesterol pill. This one has to be scoffed immediately after my toast or it would cause reflux and then I would need another pill. That’s a pink and white bullet-shaped pill which reads DO NOT EAT on the label. I wonder what the difference between eating and swallowing is?
If it fell on to the 76-year-old uneven floor and rolled under the fridge I wonder if it would kill ants harbouring there?
If I have a big day ahead of me like sorting or pregnancy testing cows I have a packet of ibuprofen pills I can resort to. One or two will ease the muscle cramps also caused by the cholesterol pills.
By 10.30am when I haven’t done anything productive apart from hanging out the washing, I’m too scared to climb hills or walk fast in case I rattle.
In the evening I take a magnesium pill to stop the cramps the cholesterol pills cause.
Every four years I ask the doctor for 30 tiny blue pills in case I have to sleep away from home. They have the most vile taste (my doctor said it’s so you don’t get addicted to them).
They are best rolled in honey then slurped down with a big glass of warm water. Four hours later you are guaranteed to be awake as you will keep needing to use the loo. The bonus is you will be left with a dry throat that tastes as if a possum slept in there.
It took me 13 years to get used to those blood pressure pills then I had a massive heart attack (which the pills were meant to prevent). But perhaps if I hadn’t had them I might not be writing this story.
I remove the labels from the pill bottles when finished with them and they make great containers for concentrated weed killer – 25mls for the liquid and 5mls for the granules tipped into five litres of water in the backpack is guaranteed to give any thistles or ragwort a good headache.
Now all this writing has given me one.
Shall I just ignore it and hope it will go away or go look for another pill?
