Okay, maybe not kill but definitely make me uncomfortable.

I have had two bizarre pill incidents in one week and I am hoping and praying (to the God I don’t believe in) that this is not one of those things that comes in threes.

First.  Stuck in Detroit overnight because of my flight problems (read TFOL Fat Friday – Flying While Fat and Old) – I get up Tuesday morning from what should have been my own bed, but sadly is just a rental (from the Detroit Airport Westin).  The day before is going down in my books as a really lousy day.  And I did not sleep well.

Time to take my daily handful of pills. 

This is something I do every day of my fat old lady life.  I take 8-9 pills depending on the day, every morning.  I am the GOAT when it comes to pill taking and I always take them all in one gulp. 

This particular morning, my throat decides it wants to let some of the water down into my trachea – you know, the breathing tube; the tube where water is most definitely not welcome.  My throat decides this AFTER I have already placed 8 pills in my mouth. 

I am now desperately trying to not choke on the water, not lose any of the pills, and get those pills swallowed before they start to dissolve – because we all know how nasty dissolved pills are and how long that taste can linger. 

Fuck.

I cough up some water but manage (somehow) to swallow all of the pills.

Or so I thought.

Nope.  One of those little fuckers has made an escape attempt and is now firmly lodged in the back of my nose.  This bitter, bitter, nasty, nasty little pill is also slowly dissolving making my whole body want to eject the offending ovoid by way of the dry heaves. 

And the taste.  OMG (TIDBI).  The taste.  This is much worse than a pill dissolving in your mouth.  This is back in the throat – where your “bitter” tastebuds are so conveniently located and is slowly dripping little but very bitter tears of pure gack down my throat. 

Mama, mama, make it stop!

I cough, I try to suck it out, I try to blow it out.  

It clearly has no intention of budging.

I finally stop having the dry heaves and take a hot shower, resigned to tasting pill gack for the rest of my life.

An unexpected benefit of the hot shower is that causes my body to envelop the pill in a great ball of snot and when I exit the shower, I blow my nose and out comes that little ball of devil spit.  And just to make sure I knew it came out (because white pill dissolved in clear mucus is not easy to discern against the background of a white tissue) part of the pill is now dangling from my bottom lip. 

Second.  (I’ll bet you can hardly wait after that one; but please read on because it gets better and even more bizarre).

Saturday morning, it is about 6:30 a.m., way too early for this fat old lady to be thinking of getting up – however, there is this weird burning sensation in the back of my right nostril.  I turn over, hoping the pain will go away. 

Instead, it gets progressively worse, and now my mouth has a very bad sour taste in it and I’m drooling, and my eye is watering like crazy.

WTF?

I take off my CPAP and head to the bathroom.

On the way, something literally falls out of my nose, onto my stomach.

WTSF?

Something with a distinct blue-green color.

I pick it off my belly and it feels like plastic.

Now I am seriously concerned.

I know that color.  I know that shape.

It is a fucking ibuprofen gel cap!

Now you would think this would be a mystery for the ages.  Did I get up in the middle of the night and shove an ibuprofen gel cap up my nose?  How the fuck did it get there?

I’ll tell you how. 

At the Detroit Airport Westin, getting out my necessaries from my luggage, I discovered that an almost full bottle of 300 ibuprofen gel caps had come open.  I spent the next 15 minutes or so, emptying the bag and collecting as many straying gel caps as I could find.  And that’s the last I thought of that. 

Until Saturday morning.

It seems I missed at least one gel cap and it somehow got itself into the workings of my CPAP machine.  It wasn’t in the tubing – I would have seen and/or heard that – also my tubing was up in the top section of the bag where it was save from any gel cap incursion. 

So sometime during the night, as I slept, blissfully unaware, my CPAP blew a fucking ibuprofen gel cap up my nose. 

You can’t make this stuff up, folks. 

Well you can, but who would believe it?