Pills to the Gills

April 24th, 1996 Posted in Cubicle Blues

My co-worker Takisha comes over to my cubicle to ask if there’s anything I need, since she’s feeling really bad and was thinking of leaving early.

“No, of course not,” I say, trying as best I can to approximate this ‘empathy’ business I keep hearing so much about. “Go home, get some rest.”

“Thanks,” she says. “My head feels like it’s in a vise.” She brings up her hands around her head to accentuate the point. Sure enough: it looks just like her head’s in a vise.

“Wow,” I say. “Have you, you know, tried taking a Tylenol or something?”

“Oh, I took six Tylenols an hour ago,” she says dismissively. “But they didn’t seem to work.”

“Oh. Well, I guess you—wait, you took SIX Tylenols?”

“Uh huh,” she says. The conversation lags a bit at this point, since my jaw’s dropped and I’m looking at her like she’s just opened up her skull and started scooping pudding out of it into her mouth.

“What?” she says eventually, registering my shock.

“Uh,” I say. “Were they Regular Strength?”

“No, Extra Strength.” As if to accentuate her sound logic, her hands fly up to do the vise thing again, but I wave her down with a silent gesture, letting her know I’m caught up on the vise concept.

I’m trying to dance around this as best I can, but the whole idea is bewildering. “Doesn’t it say to take one or two on the bottle? Like, every six hours?” I pause. “To avoid dying?” I add.

“Well, I took three originally,” she clarifies, leading me gently through her reasoning as one would a recalcitrant and mildy retarded five year old. “But my head still hurt, so I took three more.”

“Oh,” I say, mildly reassured. “So you waited, like, an hour or two?”

A look like I’m from Mars. “No, five minutes. It really hurt.” Her hands go up for the vise thing again. I make more ‘no need’ motions. She does the vise thing again anyway, so I let this play out before diving in again.

“Maybe,” I say, “maybe your head still hurts, not so much from the headache, but from the massive trauma of an acetaminophen overdose.”

“Oh, Jay,” Takisha says, laughing. “You kill me.”

“I doubt I’ll get the chance unless I hurry,” I think as she leaves, doing the vise thing to passerby.

I had no idea people’s reasoning worked like this. The idea of medicine, as I understood it, was to take a prescribed dosage in the hope that an ailment would get better. Not to just keep taking handfuls of medication until it got better. My lungs are ravaged with cigarette smoke, and I have the liver constitution of a tequila worm, so I’m the last person to be lecturing people on the safe use of drugs. But at least I’m fully aware of the damage I’m doing to myself (or at least aware of the dangers, however invincible I might erroneously believe myself to be.) I don’t smoke an entire pack of cigarettes and chew nicotine gum if the first smoke “doesn’t quite cut it.”

I suspect there are people out there who think drugs are basically magic, and you just keep taking them until the magic kicks in. It hurts my head to the point where I need a Tylenol. These are chemicals that affect your physical and mental processes. Many drugs, such as Tylenol, aren’t even designed to fix problems so much as mask them. You take how many it says on the bottle because it’s been determined that more than that would seriously hurt you. Are we as a culture really this stupid that we need Tylenol to package their product in two-tablet packs?

If you put a huge bowl of dog food in front of a domesticated dog, it’ll just keep eating and eating until it hurts itself, since its been acclimatized to having its food rationed out and lacks the ability to think for itself. I should leave a big tub of kibble beside my coworker’s desk tomorrow, and see if she’s managed to explode by noon.

I don’t know why manufacturers even bother putting childproof caps on medicine. They’re clearly fighting against the tide if the parents themselves are letting their kids pop Tylenol like pez when an ailment doesn’t immediately go away.