One Pill, Two Pills

I woke up feeling drowsy from all the medications I took last night.

Image by Aqiela A

I reached for my phone. 2:50 p.m. More than thirteen hours of sleep, and somehow, I’m still tired. I’m exhausted by my own routine. Sometimes I wonder what it feels like to wake up and simply begin your day.

My doctors are trying to fix me. One is trying to fix my body. The other is trying to fix my mind. One gives me pills to function. The other gives me pills to slow my mind down enough to rest. Somehow, they keep contradicting each other.

It’s a Saturday, and I should be going out and having fun, trying to act and feel like a human being after a tough workweek. Yet I’m still drowsy from yesterday’s medications.

The pills do what they’re supposed to do. They calm me down and quiet the inflammation. They help, in their own way. And I feel relaxed, I really do.

I can feel that all of the pills make me feel at ease while also helping keep my autoimmune under control, at least for the time being. But these medications still can’t pull me enough to go out and function, or even make me productive at home; even sweeping and mopping the floor, or even showering, feels like a liability.

My autoimmune doctor tells me that maybe, one day, the inflammation will calm down. Maybe it’ll even go away as I get older. I hold onto that “maybe” more than I probably should. But sometimes another question follows, “Will I even live long enough to find out?”

My psychiatrist doesn’t offer the same kind of hope. She tells me these things won’t disappear. I’ll carry them for the rest of my life.

So I try to make peace with the fact that people will call me lazy because they can’t see the battle my body is fighting. They’ll call me careless when I forget what I was about to say halfway through a sentence. They’ll laugh when I lose my train of thought. They’ll never know that sometimes my brain feels like it’s trying to run through fog.

I start counting my pills. One pill. Two pills. Three pills. Then I lose count. There are too many. The kind of handful that makes your throat ache before you’ve even swallowed them. One for the inflammation, at least three to reduce my autoimmune problems, and at least five to fix the chemical imbalance in my brain. They make you gag; they disgust you.

I just want a normal routine like what normal people have. The kind most people never even think about. To wake up. Brush my teeth. Get dressed. Leave the house. They wake up and simply go on with their days, not wake up and prepare the pills they have to take just to make it through theirs.

But this is my normal. This has been my normal for years. This is my normal and I know it’s not okay. It never was. I don’t think it ever will be. And I will never pretend that it is.