sPillover

I wouldn't have believed you if you would have told me a few years earlier that my threshold of pain would go down, slowly. You see, I am the kind of person who doesn't believe in pills. I mean, it's not like I refuse to believe that medicine works, that small quantities of certain chemicals will in turn take care of certain chemicals in my body and magically, things will be better. Phew. No, that's not what I mean.

What I do mean is..wait, let me illustrate it with the help of a story. A very long time ago, there used to be a little girl. A delicate little girl, who used to fall ill at the drop of a hat. Her parents wouldn't let her take allopathy treatment as they were scared of the side effects. So throughout her life she was used to taking these small balls of sugar. And they worked, placebo effect or not.

Then one fine day, the girl happened to watch a movie. A very average, if not below, Hindi movie. It starred Salman Khan and umm..Revathi? Well, to cut a long story short, which unfortunately they didnt, the climax of the scene involved the girl getting into a macabre accident i.e. glass piercing through her abdomen. No medicines would work on her as since childhood she used to pop those evil tablets and capsules, for no reason, even if she was hale and hearty. So scientifically they explained in the movie, that it lead to a lower immunity and no medicines would work on her.

This was during the times I did not even know the spelling of the word paranoia. But set in, it did. Since that time, I had vowed to never be so stupid, I mean what if glass or any other sharp object for that matter went through my abdomen or any other part of the body for that matter! So I avoided pills whenever I could. Incredible pain, terrible flu, high fever, any kind of ailment and my treatment would be to sleep it off. For milder cases, it worked. When it got really severe, to the point that maybe my survival depended on it, I would resort to pills.

But as Murphy, my best friend, was watching all of this, I think somewhere he gave a sinister laugh. He also gave me acne problem. And it was the kind of problem that doesn't go away with clean and clear. There were pills, capsules, tablets, colourful, stinky, long, small, you imagine it, I have taken it. But one good thing came out of it - I outgrew my paranoia, to a certain extent. Pills weren't so bad. Pills are good, if taken in normal quantities.

Alas! With these positive changes, came the negative. My will power, strengthened by my paranoia in the bygone years, has gone down considerably. Ok, maybe you are wondering what kind of a psycho would willingly want to suffer, when in pain. Good point. But it's not easy to explain. Let me put it this way - nowadays, if I am in pain, the first thought I get is where the painkiller is. If it's a cold, I want to reach out for the tablet that in the advertisements sends a golden light through your oesophagus and magically cures it.

Fear, in the right amount and at the right time, can serve us well. I need to be afraid. Someone please show me a news link of a woman/man who developed 15 butts as a side effect from taking medicines for common ailments. Maybe that will help me snap out of this.