Heather Menzies Jones
www.WriterHeather.com
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What Fresh Hell?

Berlin - March 8, 2018

 

I woke up last night – not unusual – I wake up many nights at two or three regardless of wine or coffee – I’ve heard that sleep is disrupted at my age – people joke about it, although it’s not so amusing when it’s dark and one’s mind churns. I try to remember my German lessons, which article, das, der, die – which one adheres to which noun. Then a name becomes stuck. I can’t remember someone’s name a name that would have at one point in the past tripped off my tongue but now it unglues itself and only hours or days later will it pop unbidden into my head and I think I’m coming down with my heritable brand of cognitive decline.

I can’t be the only one. . . 

CNN, NBC, ABC, NPR - I get it, I know your demographic. I am your demographic, but until I retired last June from a busy career as an English teacher, I did not measure out my days tuning in, periodically during daylight hours, to catch up on the latest dispatches from the Trump administration’s current circle of hell. Seriously, last June, the words Trump administration weren’t used together except as a late-night laugh line. 

But, this is not about Trump. Not yet anyway. I’m writing about the ads. I’m writing about being a quasi-hypochondriac who must listen to ads for medicines whose contraindications are so horrifying and go on for so long. 

A patch to treat smoking addiction associated with suicidal thoughts. 
A pill for plaque psoriasis linked to fatal susceptibility to fungal infections.
An inhaler for COPD linked to severe, potentially fatal shortness of breath.

And all of these ads end by suggesting, I believe far too casually, that if hapless patients are suffering from such symptoms, they are to give their primary care physicians a jingle. 

This, of course, causes me to think of the last time I wanted to reach my own doctor. Full disclosure - it was not an emergency. I had to logon to the medical website, didn’t remember my username, couldn’t dredge up my password, had somehow deleted the note of user names and passwords on my cell phone, and spent an HOUR of my rapidly diminishing time on this earth trying to speak to a human being at my doctor’s office. 

I was not gasping for last breaths. I was not feeling suicidal, at least not at the beginning of the hour. I was, however, feeling very fungally susceptible. 

heather jones