Excedrin

After dad left in 1986, and all the way up to when I left home in 92, mom would plow through a 60 count bottle of Excedrin a day.  She always complained of headaches and other aches and, of course, 60 Excedrin a day eventually led to a ton of other problems that…required more Excedrin.  She’d wash it all down with a stream of Coors.  When recycling began in our neighborhood, we used paper grocery bags (the dedicated recycling containers took a couple years to catch up) and mom would fill three bags a day with crushed cans of Coors.  I don’t think all that Excedrin liked that behavior.

I’ve always been curious:  Why Excedrin?  Naturally, because I’m scarred by my youth, I’ve avoided the drug and have assumed a forced ignorance as to what it contained.  The other day, as I related mom’s charming dietary habits to a friend, he told me that Excedrin’s big hook is the caffeine.  An ah-ha moment that led me to the internet.

It’s not just a little bolt of caffeine hidden away – it’s 65 milligrams per tablet.  A Mountain Dew has 54 or so.  A cup of coffee hovers around 100.  So, let’s see, sixty pills times 65 milligrams…. Oh my god!  So mom was hopped up on almost four grams of caffeine a day.  According to the internet (my only friend) two grams is a potentially lethal dose.

Poor mom, eh?  There are many rumors surrounding her suicide in 1999.  One is that health issues led her down that path.  We’ll never know.  When mom killed herself, she cleaned her apartment of anything questionable.  No booze, no drugs (prescription or otherwise).  Important documents, wallet, ID, credit cards stacked up on the kitchen table with her purse.  It was a weird experience going into her place.  She and I hadn’t talked since I ran off to college, and the whole cleansed space was a bit overwhelming.  The planning of a suicide is worse than the death itself, I think.

I avoid pills at all costs.  Perhaps some of that is the ever-present Excedrin of my youth.  The bottles, today, look ominous and threatening to me.  I also spent five years sucking down a few dozen pills a day to control my nerve injury, and my now year-old miracle operation has freed me from those.  Those two elements – a little dash of childhood PTSD and a former reliance on medication – have put me in a position where my reaction to a headache is to just lie down and let it run the course.

In March, I picked up a nasty flu.  My fever was topping 104, and I spent a day in bed, delirious.  I remember spending several hours during the day trying to remember the “four races” from Stargate, and getting stuck on the Asgard.  And becoming frustrated and angry in a sort of pseudo-dream state…unable to get up and even check the computer.  And how could I forget the Asgard?  And why was I thinking of Stargate in such an intimate way whilst on my deathbed?

My uncle woke me the next morning.  He knew I was sick and, when I dropped out of touch for 24 hours (which is not my way), he came over to check on me.  Or maybe take my stereo.  He found me wrapped up in blankets, sweating, muttering incoherently, and he took my temperature, which was at the 104 mark for the 30th straight hour.  Then he said, look, take a Tylenol.  And that broke the fever, cleared my head, and had me up in bed about 20 minutes later.  At which time I laughed and talked about the Asgard as if everything in Stargate was real.

It had crossed my mind to pop a Tylenol, but that neurotic dislike for pills convinced me to spend a day and a half in the grips of a brain boiling fever.  Now that’s dedication to a mental illness.  At least, when I drive my car into a tree and kill myself, I won’t be doing it with a ruined gut and bowels.  Nope, my bowels will be packed with 100% Real Brand(tm) Cheese and Pillsbury Cinnamon Buns.  Mmmm-Mmmm!