One morning, around eighteen years ago, I woke to find my left arm somewhat numb. I put this down to a bad sleeping position and got on with my day. By the afternoon my entire left side was comfortably numb and I assumed that I had somehow trapped a substantial nerve. It took a trip to the doctors to bring me back to reality, I had had a stroke; although thankfully a small one.
At the time I was living in Brunei, and having exhausted the capabilities of the local medical service, my company sent me to a specialist in London. Several thousand pounds later, the consensus of opinion was that nobody had a bloody clue what had caused it, that all my tests results checked out OK, and that I must just have blood that has a tendency to clot more than it should.
All I got out of this was an instruction to take aspirin every day, and a fine collection of MRI scans of my brain. The latter were great for making a T-shirt with a graphic of my head and a slogan “If you think my brain is big, you should see my dick”; although I never had the guts to wear it.
As for the numbness, that disappeared over time as idle brain cells took over the tasks previously held by brain cells that had been killed off in the stroke. Pretty damn clever of my brain; although when I get very tired the newly assigned cells go on strike and hold up little placards saying “we weren’t designed for this” (or at least that is what I assume they are doing), and partial numbness returns.
My view is that the personal and business related stress I was going through at the time contributed to the incident. Doctors, however, refuse to accept stress as a symptom, because god knows they get enough of it, what with having to work four hours a day before heading for the golf course. For my part, I try to live as stress-free life as possible to help ensure no more brain cells get exterminated.
So it is ironic that a continual source of stress is the bloody bastard aspirin container which I have to battle with on a daily basis.
As it comes from the shop, it is not a threatening object:
But open the lid to remove a pill…..
First there is the tinfoil cover which cannot be peeled off, it has to be pierced by a sharp object. But don’t worry about damaging the pills underneath because there aren’t any to be found. Instead, crammed tightly into the neck, are two sets of instructions. These are almost impossible to remove without the aid of needle-nosed pliers. Fortunately, I have such pliers, but there must be grannies around the world, laying dead on the floor, clutching an aspirin pill bottle still containing the full complement of pills which grannie was unable to access. Put that on Wikileaks.
Finally I manage to remove the instructions. No point in reading them because they will just say: “put pill in mouth, drink, swallow”; and I can just about manage that without needing guidance. But no sign of the pills yet. Instead there is a packet of silica gel of just the right dimensions that it is impossible to remove. If you try, then you will almost certainly break the packet, leaving the beads of silica gel (which are conveniently almost exactly the same size as the aspirin) to rattle around in the container with the pills. I have no idea what role silica gel might play in stroke prevention, but I have certainly ingested some as aspirin substitutes over the years.
It’s a fucking nightmare, and I rarely manage to clear all the obstacles to the pills; meaning that every day I have a little stress-filled battle to extract the pills I require. Except for the latest bottle, where I spent a happy twenty minutes extracting all the crap so I could photograph it for you.
Unfortunately, I won’t get the full 60 pills worth of benefit out of this, because while I was uploading the photos to my computer, a cat jumped on the table and ate three of the pills and rendered 14 others unsuitable for human consumption. Being a cat, this will not thin her blood, but it will most likely make her vomit, probably on something that is hard to wash. More stress due to aspirin tablets.