Take the Pill

Last Updated on September 15, 2022 by ADMIN-TOM

To misquote a scene from the hit film The Matrix, “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You take the red pill; you stay in wonderland.“

In my case, I’m applying this to the wonderland of Cyprus medicine, notably the General Health System. A sort of UK NHS but where the bed-knobs are falling off and the bedpans sometimes overflow. I’m stretching the imagination a little because the system works quite well. In my current state of precarious health, I have Lymphoplasmacytic Lymphoma, a low-grade, i.e., slow-growing, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, I’m being cared for very well as an outpatient.

This rare Lymphoma develops from B lymphocytes which is a type of white blood cell that become abnormal, growing out of control. White blood cells form part of your immune system, which helps fight infections.

It’s been caught early and is treatable and hopefully can be cured with chemotherapy. It came about because I developed a cough, which left me feeling breathless, unable to walk, talk a lot or do anything. At the time it was discovered that I had a heart problem. But then I was sent for multiple tests to find the cause of the breathlessness, and, to cut a long story short, they discovered the Lymphoma. The Cyprus GHS worked.

However, apart from chemotherapy, I currently take nine pills a day for heart and blood pressure and each month I experience a problem getting the correct pills or dosage of pills. Nobody else I know seems to experience this wonderland of pills that sometimes are prescribed and at other times just disappear from the system. Today is no exception.

A pill prescribed six months age for my heart arrythmia was Digoxin which I could only get from the General Hospital, not my local pharmacy. In my silly, stupid innocent way I asked at the pharmacy if it was possible to get this pill from them. The answer was yes in the form of Lanoxin in a different dosage, which meant I had to take two pills instead of one, but also meant no long trip to the hospital and five-minute walk, which took me ten minutes because of my breathlessness.

Low and behold, my request was granted, and I received the different version of the same thing, as manna from heaven… but only once. The next month the prescription for this went back to the original version. Why? Nobody knew. So, I bought a box of what I wanted (yes, I could, at the time, buy these over the counter) until I sorted the prescription out.

This month I saw my doctor, explained the problem in person and she insisted I cannot and never could get the pills I wanted from my local pharmacy. After a brief disagreement, she typed out a special prescription for me because I insisted, I had received these pills from the pharmacy.

On Friday I paid an eager visit to the pharmacy, to be told the pills I wanted cannot be supplied by the pharmacy because of supply issues from the UK! “Hah!” is all I could manage to say, shout, or even scream. Words failed me.

So, today I went, tail between legs, to the General Hospital. I presented the prescription and… was told the doctor had prescribed One, yes, 1, that’s right, dear reader, ONE pill! Not a box of 120 which was what I received last time… all those months ago!

The pharmacist took pity on me, probably due to the maniacal laughter mixed with frustrated screams of “Hah!” (I was speechless, again) and she allowed me to take twenty-one pills home. Not before asking me, “How many pills do you take?”

“Two,” I said with a small whimper.

“Okay,” she said pouring twenty-one pills into an envelope.

On the way home, I realised one slightly nutty thing, two does not easily divide into twenty-one. And when I got home and opened my precious little envelope, I realised something else. Fate had taken a hand. There, in the envelope, were twenty-one little blue pills. “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You take the red pill; you stay in wonderland.“

Somehow, I think in my story, I’m staying in wonderland no matter what colour the pills are.

Footnote: Wonderland it is! The story, regarding my blue pills, has gone well since I wrote this piece… right up until yesterday, 14th Sep 2022. The health authority has run out of Lanoxin and have no idea when, or if, there will be another delivery. This, it seems, is down to Brexit.
Where does that leave me? Down a rabbit hole with no idea which way to turn. Watch this space, or the obituaries, for more on this story.

You just can’t judge a book by its cover. So maybe you would like to read one of my books as well as admire the cover.