Whatnot II: The Whatnottening

Feeling quite a bit better. Doesn't really hurt much when I breathe at all, which, you know, yay. Still very tired, though, but we've got help this week. I feel like an idiot for having had such poorly controlled asthma for so long when I knew I should be taking controller meds. I just didn't...think it was all that serious? Or I was used to it being a certain way? On the upside, it seems like if I become a "more compliant" patient I can pretty much never be bothered by asthma. On the downside...nothing going forward, but I feel dumb. And I hate to take medicine, and am generally just not a very compliant person. "Belle, you whatnot, you take like 7 kinds of medicine a day; why are you caring?" Taking medicine all the time constitutes an internal image of myself as a sick person, and I don't want to be a sick person, so I...don't take my medicine properly? Also, "taking your medicine" is a kind of shorthand for getting your butt (justifiably) kicked for a reason, because talking medicine isn't fun. I had a high-school friend who would go off her meds and have epileptic seizures, which seems crazy. The thing was, she hated the way the meds made her feel, and didn't mind having discrete episodes of seizures which were mere notes in the calm, alert staff of life with no freaky meds. Doing things every day, at the right time, taking care of myself--this is all stuff I'm not good at. I sympathize with the crazy chick in the movie who palms her meds in the psych ward. The T9 text predictor in my mobile phone works very well, but it always gives more common possibilities first (like "of" for "me"). It thinks that "pick" is more likely to be what I want to type than "sick". It is wrong. I know from experience that after I've sent enough text messages to my friends it will eventually learn. Someday after I've had the phone for a long time it will offer up "sick" on the first try. 7425. 7425. 7425.

Comments

[Timothy Burke]

I hear you. I'm supposed to be on long-term asthma control meds, but I can't seem to focus on the need to do so with enough intensity to make it a habitual part of my day. I'm supposed to take folic acid and one children's aspirin a day for cardiac health, same thing.

[Nakku]

What utter whatnottery!
I'm also very bad at taking medicine, largely because I think my body ought to be able to deal with stuff by itself.
So if I ever get an actual serious illness, I'm toast.

[onymous]

"...because talking medicine isn't fun."

Sounds more creepy than fun.

[onymous]

Sorry, I don't mean to be a rude lurker, that was just an amusing image. It is good to hear you are feeling better.

[belle waring]

"because talking medicine isn't fun"
that only happens after I've been palming the pills for a few days. ;)

[dragonet2]

I take my blood pressure meds Every Day with the reminder of a friend who was disabled in her early 50s by being in denial of having high blood pressure. She stood by the myth that her "Scandinavin genes" would make her more tolerant of high fat/high meat diets, which she did often to fight overweight. She lost. She's in a very nice residential home, and happy here, but her husband suffers guilt that he can't keep her at home. But home is a ginormous Victorian house which just did not work. And he's as old as she is and a thin man, and caring for her was going to break him too.

I take my meds. They keep my bp in the 120/80 range. I like that.

[Adam Roberts]

I've been asthmatic all my life, really quite seriously as a child; now I take a single inhaler every morning and every evening ('Seretide' is the proprietary name) and it absolutely controls the asthma. It is the difference between having a perfectly normal life and me lying on my bed in a cork-lined room wheezing. I really don't exaggerate when I say that.

When I play that mental game, 'which historical period would I have most enjoyed being born into?' I'm always brought up sharp by the knowledge that had I been born into any century before the C20th my asthma would have killed me as a child. Modern life has its flaws, but the advance in medication for chronic asthma is not one of them.

Which is a roundabout way of saying: asthma medication are the sine qua non of me living my ordinary life. I guess I've been on them so long that I don't feel like my butt is being kicked; I feel a sense of near-miraculous enablement.

[Matt Weiner]

I would say Wow! I did not know that, but actually I did not know anything about Highlander II. I'm not even positive that that's what you're alluding to.

Anyway, yay breathing.

[bitchphd]

Just pretend the meds are birth control pills. That'll improve your compliance right quick.

[asilon]

My predictive text thinks I am more likely to talk about a nun than my mum. This annoys me greatly.

[Cala]

My T9 won't let me swear. The number of text messages I've sent that say "What the duck?" Not small.

[belle waring]

I think you mean "why the dual", cala.

[washerdreyer]

T9 also confuses anal with cock, just so you know.