A Dose of Your Own Medicine
You know when your chest hurts but it’s early days so you know just a little bit of medicine will fend off development into the ebola virus?
And although you don’t have any medicine, luckily the dog is over the allergies and won’t be needing any more of that bottle this side of autumn?
But you can’t find a spoon, and you probably haven’t looked very hard but you were always very good at judging spatial relationships, coming top of a class of 400 on the IBM test involving lots of diagrams and thinking, though involving no medicine?
And when you make cornbread you add milk direct to the mixture while looking over at a corner in the kitchen where the measuing jug is, because you can calculate the volume of liquid you are pouring into one container by looking at the empty space it would occupy if it was in another container?
So you pick up the bottle and pour the medicine down you, judging the liquid volume not by your eyes which can’t see the strangely flavoured nectar, but by contact with the inside of your throat, until you say, that’s about right?
Only it’s not about right.
It’s not even close. And your brain has been flitting ever since between a state of doziness and a state of wiredness, neither conducive to typing, or even to making sense. You hear yourself think and you say, I don’t know what I mean.
And you finally realize why grown men would scale the walls of your childhood Dublin West home to sit under the washing line and drink bottles of medicine in a very social manner.
I need tea.
See Also:
• Pharmaceuticals: The difference between America and Ireland
• Irish Immigrants & Bad Birds
• Irish Fests
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
I know this all too well…when you are sick and feel that you are your own best doctor. Who has time to go to the doctor anyway. There are gigs to play, places to be, and work to get done… so you take that swig of decongestant, or in my case vicks 44, and off you go. It’s not until you are half way through your errands that you remember what that plastic cap was for, and maybe just maybe you should have used it.