An insane foray into medication.

Six weeks ago I approach my primary care physician with the complaint of a suspected kidney stone: dull ache in the murky vicinity of the back guts, familiar pang. We do a urinalysis and find nothing, and he orders an x-ray. In 2022 this means that it will fall to me, a fully employed and busy person whose job is NOT health care to find another health pro, a radiologist, to do the x-ray, probably in some remote clime like Burbank, or North Hollywood; 2.5 hours round trip, plus parking, etc. I do not follow through, relegating the task to the “someday” section of the task management software I use to file things I will never do.

Meanwhile I am plagued by procrastination and anxiety and absent-mindedness something dreadful and actually DO try to do something about it. Recommendations from friends, referrals to health care, good advice etc. I make an appointment with a psych. Is it ADHD? Has it always been. I am reminded of chiding teachers throughout my k12 career, and well into college.

Four weeks ago I awake at 2 am with a bizarre pain in the abdomen. I suspect food poisoning: a delicious but suspect rice bowl from a thai food stall dripping with half cooked eggs and sketchy sai ua. I get out of bed, and an hour later, the pain now electric and specific. It announces itself to me like gabriel: this is your appendix. I google symptoms and know it for fact. We go to the ER and some administrata harrying later I find myself wild-eyed and frantic as an oxygen mask is slipped over me and zap out for two hours while they cut the damn thing out. I wake up frantic, mind racing. I wonder if that’s what death and maybe reincarnation will be like: the terror of the final moments, conscious and full of dread, and then the empty and blank blackness of oblivion. And then shot back into reality absolutely baffled.

A week later and I’m more or less healed from the surgery. Laparoscopic. My bellybutton is changed forever: no longer an outie-innie, a charming button set back from the surface. Now a strange inverted parenthetical thought, a burning man emoji: )’(, but healing nicely. I have my scheduled psych evaluation with a doctor who shares a name with a Hollywood actor, and he thinks it’s not ADHD but general anxiety. Meanwhile the breathing tube from surgery has left me with a lingering cough in a brutalized trachea.

I lose 10 pounds in the ensuing weeks. I suddenly find myself intolerant of diet sodas: I can feel them slogging through my kidneys. I give them up almost entirely. I am more well-hydrated than I have ever been: drinking water turns out to be the trick comma who knew question mark eye roll emoji full stop.

And that’s how, 7 weeks ago I went from taking 1 pill of Truvada as necessary in the hale and hearty blush of youth to today, when daily I take 4 capsules of Metamucil, a Truvada, a Lexapro, two tablets of Mucinex, and ibruprofen for the headache of it all. My nightstand looks like my grandpa’s.