Read The Label, Obey The Label

Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping.  I drift off easily enough, but after three or four hours in bed I wake up with an urgent need use the bathroom.  This new late night regularity has become a bit irritating. By morning I’m feeling completely pooped out.  I have had trouble seeping the past, stomach issues too, but this gastrointestinal driven insomnia was something new.  I had just decided to see the doctor when I realized that I had been mistakenly taking stool softeners instead of over counter sleep aids.  The bottles look almost the same.

Why was the bottle of stool softeners sitting next to the bottle of sleep aids in my medicine cabinet? This arrangement merely invites disaster, especially if you don’t look too closely at the labels.  If I were living by myself, my obsessive-compulsive disorder would never permit such an arrangement to occur.  But I don't live by myself; I live in Kellie's World, a strange and mysterious place where order and reason are just abstract, meaningless concepts, and chaos rules the day.  In her world it makes perfect sense to put the laxatives next to a nearly identical bottle containing sleeping pills.  “Do you know what else makes sense,” Kellie said, “reading the label on the bottle before you start taking pills.”

Reading the label, however, didn't help Kellie at all because she just ignored what it said.  Whereas my misuse of the pills was purely accidental, Kellie's little misadventure with those pills was easily foreseeable.  She purchased the stool softeners because, let’s just say, she felt a little congested. But Kellie can be a bit impatient, and she was not too happy about the 12-72 hour period that the directions indicated it would take for the drug to produce the desired effect.  So she decided that she could speed up the process by taking a few extra pills. She soon discovered that, for some people, the pills work much faster than advertised, particularly when you triple the dose.  Kellie did get things running pretty quickly, much more than she had intended, I suspect.  

These two little episodes demonstrate that while Kellie and I may take different paths, in the end, we eventually wind up in the same crappy place.