Jagged Little Pills

… to quote Alanis Morisette. That’s what you get when you cut big pills in half. I don’t know about you but I have never been able to swallow large tablets unless they are the smooth capsule type. My mother was the same, so is my sister. Perhaps it’s a nervous thing. Faced with the hard immensity of the thing, our throats close up so that something the size of a small beach pebble suddenly makes you feel as if you’ve swallowed Gibraltar. But cutting them in two isn’t the answer owing to those sharp, jagged corners that lacerate tender tissue on the way down and feel just like pieces of glass.

So I bought one of those pill crushers. Faced with a heap of powder, the next question was how to get that down the old cherry lane. I tried water but a mouthful of grit made the throat rebel again. Remembering that my mother used to crush a bitter aspirin tablet in strawberry jam for us when we were kids (the acrid taste of the aspirin always cut throught the sweetness and made me gag), I tried binding the powder in honey but again, the result tasted vile and wouldn’t go down.

Someone suggested that taking a mouthful of milk helps a pill go down. I tried it and, glory be, it worked, but the trouble is, I can’t stand milk. Never have. As a newborn, I refused breast milk. My harrassed mother had to express it and drip it into my mouth from a teaspoon, probably mixed with strawberry jam. At school, the reward for doing well in class was an extra third pint bottle of milk. The milk crates were always stacked next to the radiator, which meant that the milk would have gone totally off by the afternoon when the ‘prizes’ were doled out. No wonder my reports always read, ‘could do better’.

There are two remedies that I use a lot, Glucosamine and L-Lysine, the first for my arthritic fingers and the second as an immune system boost (when taken with a Vit C) to ward off colds and cold sores (thank you, Dr John Briffa, for recommending this brilliant combination). I have spent lots of money only to open the bottles at home and find they contain hard tablets, impossible for me to swallow. So I decided to search on-line. Several Internet minutes later, I had located L-Lysine in capsule form and, amazingly, Glucosamine in powder form which you mix with water and drink once a day with a meal. (It’s called Joint Physio, for anyone who’s interested, and it available on line from Healthspan.) The resulting drink tastes like a cystitis remedy, kind of lemony but not too ghastly. Only four days after starting to take it and my finger joints are already bending more easily.

Of course I could always move to France and buy everything in suppository form, but I wonder what my piles would have to say about that? “Merde! Zut alors! Avez-vous un pea-shooter?”