Since Moses and his tablets

I refilled a prescription last Thursday which is not even close to a news item. I take seven prescriptions on a regular (daily) basis and another one for pain (from keeping track of the others) so a week where I don't fill a script is actually more noteworthy. Another argument in favor of Forever Young. This growing old and trading acid for antacid has been trying at times.

The prescription was actually an old drug I take for Sjogren's that we stopped using ("we" = the doctor who prescribes it + the pharmacist who filled it; I have a walk-on role in this) to see if it was aggravating the rheumatoid arthritis in my spine. It wasn't (I think that was the good news, but am not sure) and I had it filled at my neighborhood druggist.

This is the first time they've filled this script which was good since they genned up all the warnings and protocols I first saw when I previously took it, but to which I have never paid attention (maybe there's a pill for that?). The drug was originally developed for malaria, which I did know but it's also prescribed for auto-immune diseases, it said in the booklet though, and I would've remembered this part 'though exactly how h------ interacts is not known.'

Oh? I read and re-read that sentence for quite some time. Let me make sure I'm getting this said my evil twin, Skippy. This is a FiIK moment, he asked. To which I had no other answer but a shrug. The arthritis hasn't gotten to my shoulders, yet. If you've got it, move it, says my rheumatologist.

I've seen a commercial for a prescription med whose name had 47 letters and a number for 'anxiety' which, I suspect can be quite the challenge in terms of diagnosis, and so the little letters on the bottom of the screen explain how this stuff actually works is 'not fully understood.' Well I feel better, don't you?

Listen up medical people! This is science stuff here. Binary logic, one or zero, yes or no, inside or outside, eat-in or take-out, black or white, sekt oder selters. We're not talking English Lit essay questions here. What do I think Samuel Coleridge meant by 'meandering with a mazy motion'? Who am I, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations? And how much can I save in fifteen minutes?

I think what I find disquieting is how much of medicine is trial and error and which part of this am I. "Hmm, the blue ones the size of horse pills made him run around the outside of the clinic screaming in Urdu like a ring-tailed bandicoot. Then he dropped trou on the highway overpass and mooned truck drivers heading North on 395 for the better part of an hour." "Yes, indeed! I think we should note 'exactly how h---- interacts is unknown.' Just to be sure. We did collect his deductible, right?"
-bill kenny