2668. Life is so fragile

Dwayne was well aware, as he took his seven heart medication pills every morning, that all he need do was to pop a couple more pills in his mouth and his wife could live happily ever after on their life’s savings.

“You know,” said Dwayne to Avril his wife, “all I need do is pop a couple of extra pills into my mouth and I’d be dead meat. Life is so fragile.”

“Which pills in particular?” asked Avril.

“These ones and these ones,” said Dwayne gesturing to a couple of little plastic jars of pills.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Avril looked a picture of grief at his funeral. Currently she’s in Honolulu with her new boyfriend.

2363. Get some of her own medicine

Pearl was on substantial heart medication. She was on eight pills in the morning and three pills in the evening. The pills worked a treat. She got no or little angina. She was reasonably busy and played an active part in the local lawn bowls club.

“The thing that gets me down and causes untold stress is my husband of forty-seven years. Selwyn has Alzheimer’s, has one prosthetic leg, is blind in one eye, and is incontinent. I know it sounds awful, but I wish he would die – perhaps painlessly in his sleep. Something like that.”

But Selwyn had no intention of doing such a thing. He lived on ceaselessly.

Pearl worked out a plan. She would overdose him with her heart medication. He wouldn’t have a clue what was happening. So she did that and Selwyn died “painlessly in his sleep”.

Of course, she had used up all of the heart medication that had been prescribed for the month.  Pearl died of heart disease a week after neglecting her medicine.

Post-mortems revealed the truth. As Lorna of 34 Hillsbury Crescent said, “It wouldn’t have hurt for her to have gotten some of her own medicine.”

2187. Alien first aid

Poor Mrs. Mabel Bloxham had been chosen at random and abducted by aliens. They were taking her back to their home planet for investigation.

Normally Mabel wouldn’t have minded. In fact, she would enjoy the adventure, but in this case they had snatched her away and she was without her medication.

She asked the aliens in the flying saucer on the way (she did so via the exfibbertranslaticator) if they had extra advanced medical knowledge and could zap her back to full health. They answered that human physical makeup was so different from theirs that their advanced medicine would offer no advantage. That was why they wanted to examine her to learn more about the bodies of Earthlings. Then they might be of help.

Mrs. Mabel Bloxham’s problem was that she had no legs. Her legs were artificial. She had to take pills to stabilize things.

Upon examination the aliens were astounded. They had no idea when they abducted her that she was legless.

The aliens were from an advanced civilization. They had no word for war. They had no word for pain. They had no word for bad. They simply spread kindness throughout the universe. Which was why, when they arrived on Earth to help the humans, they cut off everyone’s legs.

2109. Take your pills

When it came to taking his regular medication Robert was careful beyond belief. If he forgot to take his pills in the morning, by afternoon he was reaping the ill-effects of such forgetfulness. All in all, there were eleven pills to take. He took them as regular as clockwork just before breakfast.

Today, however, he wasn’t sure if he had taken them. Prior to breakfast he’d been engrossed in his computer. There had been a large fire in an old house not far down the road. Possibly it was arson. That house had been there long before he was born. The Kydd Family used to live there during his school days. In fact he’d been mildly friendly with one of the Kydd daughters at one stage and had visited the house several times. Now it was a pile of ash and rubble.

There wasn’t much online about it, but Robert had been absorbed in his search for information. He had then risen from his desk and gone to the kitchen for some breakfast. But had he taken his pills?

There was nothing to indicate that he had and nothing to indicate that he hadn’t. He could hardly take them now. What if it was the second time in a day? Two lots of pills could make him ill. In fact (he didn’t know for sure) it could possibly kill him. Of course, if he had not taken the pills he would certainly know come mid-afternoon when the pain set in.

And then he became fully awake. He’d been lying in bed in that twilight between sleep and wake. He realized then that he hadn’t even got out of bed.

1597. A meditation on medication

I suppose Eoin’s death could be described as “sudden”. He’d had chronic heart disease for almost thirty years. Modern medication had kept him alive. He dutifully took all his pills every day and there’s no doubt those pills prolonged his life and gave him a reasonably seemingly carefree quality of living. But death came suddenly, as he had always suspected it would.

He was driving along the road, with his wife in the passenger seat. He was not driving fast for he was a most careful man. He quietly said “I’m going” and slumped over the steering wheel dead. His wife, a non-driver, calmly reached over and turned off the ignition key while putting her foot hard on the brake. The car skidded sideways into a service station, hitting three cars that were being refuelled. All four vehicles and the service station erupted into an unbelievable conflagration. It could be said that Eoin went out in a blaze of glory.

Strangely, of the eleven people burned, Eoin’s wife, although she suffered serious burns, was the only survivor. She was able to tell the police the sequence of events once she was well enough to do so.

Who would have thought that after years of faithful pill-taking and after a gentle “I’m going” that his death would cause such havoc? Of the eleven people burned to death, three were fathers of large families and one was a mother of two. One of the newly-created widows was soon after evicted from her house because she couldn’t pay the rent. The finance of one of the victims “did himself in”. Two children died and were mourned not only by their families but by their entire schools. Another victim was a famous novelist on the way to his publisher. He went up in smoke along with his computer and latest novel. It was a terrible loss for the world.

Once she had recovered, Queenie (for that was the wife’s name) was able to grieve and reflect. She couldn’t help but think that it may have been better if Eoin hadn’t taken his life-saving pills in the first place.