How Do You Spend Sunday Morning?

It's Sunday morning again and everybody knows what that means. For the lucky ones it's a chance to sleep in. Others have to go to work just like any other day and when you think about all the stores, restaurants and so forth that are open you have to wonder who gets to sleep in. Some folks go to church, of course, but for me it's a major event - pillbox-filling-day.

That's somewhat strange because when the 20th century ended I didn't take a single pill. Medical people thought that was remarkable for a guy my age. I had a sneaking suspicion, though, that the new century was going to be a bummer and so far I've been 100 per cent correct.
Aside from all that's been happening in the world, the new century didn't even have time to draw a deep breath before the medics said all my hormones were at base level and I'd have to take a pill. That wasn't asking too much but then they stuck me in the hospital and said I had ulcerative colitis. This, they said, meant I was in excruciating pain and they were highly indignant when I told them I didn't feel a thing. One doctor, the forceful type, said I had to be in pain and stalked out of the room when I said no. A minute later he poked his head in the door and said, "You're in pain, aren't you?"

So that meant I had to take another kind of pill, four of them a day. As might be expected I was allergic to them, itched all over, couldn't sleep and couldn't eat. The VA, which does things better, fixed me up with different pills and they work just fine. All four of them a day.

Then they installed a new elevator in our building and hard as it may be to believe it took them six weeks to do the job. Hell, in 1969 they put up the whole building in less time than that. Living on the sixth floor, this presented a problem as we had to climb five flights of stairs every time we went out. In retaliation I had a heart attack. As heart attacks go it didn't amount to much but it meant taking more pills. It was upsetting to our hamster Sadie, however, when all those EMS people came barging in at three o'clock in the morning.
Since then I've had a gadget with seven blue boxes, one for each day of the week. Each blue box has four compartments labeled morn, noon, eve and bed. You can pop each blue box out of the gadget for carrying around if you so desire, which I do not. So on Sunday morning I have to fill all 28 compartments. Starting with morning the number of pills are six, three, two and two. That comes to 13 pills a day. I have no idea what most of them are for but they said take 'em so I take 'em.

They do have interesting names, though. There's chopthedogup, lowpressuresystem, oldsalami and a few I don't recall offhand. Oh, and I almost forgot I have to carry nitroglycerin pills around with me. So far I have only taken them a few times when I had what turned out to be heartburn and one day when a cop punched me on the chest.
I thought it was kind of strange about the heartburn so I asked the docs and they said the symptoms of heartburn and a heart attack are the same unless you happen to fall over dead. I suppose that's why they call it heartburn. Kind of makes you wonder, though, about the people who pop pills for heartburn. Are they really certain that's the problem?

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