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.

2534. Always read the safety warnings

Daisy’s eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. And her punctiliousness had increased with age. For example, she carefully read every safety warning and ingredients list on anything that came in a package. Such attention to minute detail had determined what shampoo she used, and what she ate, and what brands to buy of almost everything.

The trouble was these days that often the print on the packaging was so small it was obviously never intended to be read. And coloured letters on a coloured background made reading almost impossible.

Daisy had purchased a tube of hand cream (her regular hand cream seems to have disappeared off the shop shelves). The list of “may-contains” was written in tiny letters in pale blue against a not-much darker blue background.

She had tried for a considerable time to decipher the safety message. Eventually with the help of a magnifying glass and by standing in the light coming through a window she was able to decipher the warning:

This product contains Octamethylcyclotetrasilox. Octamethylcyclotetrasilox may cause adverse reproductive effects. However, the concentration in this mixture is below the concentration cut-off required for classification.

“Oh thank goodness!” exclaimed Daisy. “I thought for a minute it contained Decamethylcyclopentasiloxane.”

2159. Slugs

When Leanna flushed her recently departed husband’s medication down the toilet, little did she realize the consequences.

Randolph had been on eleven pills in the morning and five in the evening. Leanna had read somewhere that leftover pills should be returned to the pharmacy for destruction, but post-funeral tidy-ups are busy times so she simply flushed the pills down the toilet.

The combination of chemicals had a remarkable effect on some of the bugs living in the sewer. It took a while, but one day two gigantic slugs slithered their way up the porcelain toilet bowl and began devouring the wooden seat. The slithery slugs were at least two feet long. Veronica had opened the bathroom door, screamed, and slammed the door shut.

The slugs (by now there were a whole family perhaps twenty or thirty) began to eat the wooden bathroom door. Three slugs flattened themselves out and slithered under the door. Instantly they began to devour the passageway carpet.

Leanna was practical. She got an aerosol can of fly spray that she kept under the kitchen sink. Daring to approach one of the carpet-eating slugs, she sprayed so that white foam covered the entire slug. It squirmed about a bit and died. Instantly two slugs began devouring the dead slug. They seemed to grow several inches. They loved it!

By now there was a substantial hole in the bathroom door. Forty or fifty slugs slithered into the passage way and slimed their way in all directions through the house. Leanna phoned emergency services. A snake is one thing. Rats another. But giant slugs? Yeah, right. Don’t both us again lady.

No one came to help. No one, no one, no one. Leanna got in her car and drove the fourteen miles to her sister’s place. She did not know that two slugs had already lodged themselves beneath her car.

Over time the slugs spread. They have learnt to be more deceptive. They hide beneath all sorts of things. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a whole family is living under your bed.

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.

1766. Do not take this…

How am I to know? (Excuse me a minute while I get my reading glasses; these days I can hardly read a thing without having to squint). The bottle of pills says on the label “Do not take this if you are pregnant”. How am I meant to know if I just got pregnant or not?

Doctors these days seem to proscribe medicine willy-nilly. This prescription is from the doctor attached to the Retirement Village. The pills are for my arthritis. The doctor doesn’t seem to care. He never asks if I’m trying to get pregnant or not. Goodness knows my husband and I have been trying for a few years; without much success I might add. But you never know. These pill things that I’m not meant to take if I’m pregnant could do their dirty work just at the very time I am at last going to have a baby.

The baby certainly won’t be named after the doctor by way of gratitude I can assure you. I would change my doctor here and now to someone more sympathetic, but every doctor’s visit costs money and I’ve just paid the earth to the regular Retirement Village doctor. I can ill afford to go see another.

I’ve been so inspired by that 66 year old Italian grandmother who had a baby. An inspiration! If she can do it, so can I. It keeps me going. But I hope these pills I’ve been given don’t stop any possibility. We try frequently, my husband and me, at the Retirement Village. We’ve been here for two years now.

No! No! We’re not residents at the Retirement Village. We work here. What on earth made you think otherwise?

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.

1592. How best to murder a spouse

To poison someone by putting poison in their lemon curd or lacing a black currant pie with arsenic is highly uncreative. It’s very run-of-the-mill. Likewise to get a gun and shoot someone point blank is crass. Such gross behaviour is equally uncreative. Let it be made clear: to murder someone by shooting them with a pistol is the height of boring unsophistication. Only a yob would do something so dull and unrefined. Martin Werherall believed that if he was going to kill someone it was best to do it creatively. After all, he was a pharmacist and had all sorts of resources at his fingertips.

As a teenager Martin had developed wonderful, dexterous skills. His parents had sworn black and blue that no child of theirs should put sugar in their tea or coffee. Sugar was the scourge of the contemporary diet. One simply did not need to add sugar to a beverage. Drinking sweetened things was a matter of sugar addiction. But Martin knew a magician who taught him, with practice, how to conceal a sugar cube in the back of his hand and the palm of his hand and goodness knows where else. Then with a modest wave Martin could drop the sugar cube into his mug and his parents were none the wiser.

Now that he was all grown up with his own pharmacy and married and struggling to find happiness he decided to rid himself of all matrimonial encumbrances. The easiest way was to combine his pharmaceutical and magician abilities and drop a pill into his wife’s cup. It should be made clear, in the interests of creativity, that this pill was not a pill of poison; it was a pill that was intended to prolong life and happiness in the pill-taker. Martin frequently dispensed such pills to patients in this pharmacy. But it was for sick people. Healthy people would possibly discover that their heart would begin racing irregularly and they would drop dead, basically from too much health! Such was the brilliance of Martin’s plan.

One day, with a wave of the hand, he surreptitiously dropped a pill into his wife’s cup of Camomile and Spiced Apple Tea infusion. That should finish her off.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” said his wife of seven years, pulling out a pistol concealed in her breast. She shot Martin dead.

God! No wonder Martin wanted to be rid of her. That woman was so crass.

1213. Merran’s little Shih Tzu

Merran loved her little Shih Tzu. Throughout her life she had always had a little dog, but Lan Dong was her favourite canine of all time. Merran always stood in her kitchen to have her breakfast. It was usually just a slice of toast with butter and honey, always made meticulously after she had taken her heart pills and downed a large glass of water. If she dropped some toast crumbs on the kitchen floor, Lan Dong would instantly snaffle them up.

“You’re a regular little vacuum cleaner,” Merran would say. “Who needs a broom when Lan Dong is about?”

Anyway, on this particular day, as she was taking her medication, Merran accidently dropped her open bottle of heart pills.

206. Heading for ninety

Simone was heading for ninety. She had to take five pills every day; four in the morning and one at night. One pill was for cholesterol. The other pills she wasn’t sure what they were for, but the doctor said to take them, so she did.

She took the four pills in the morning, and then a little while later she couldn’t remember if she’d taken the pills. Did I take the pills or not? she asked herself. To be on the safe side, she didn’t take another lot. She didn’t want to overdose.

A few days later, once again, she couldn’t remember if she had taken the pills. Enough is enough! thought Simone. I’m getting one of those plastic weekly pill containers. So she did. And there it was, with a little separate pill compartment for each day of the week.

Simone couldn’t remember what day of the week it was. Come Tuesday, she was sure she’d taken Wednesday’s pills. Or did I just forget to fill it with the pills at the start of the week?

She hadn’t lost her marbles. It was simply one of those jolly things about getting old.