Sometimes, a Secret is Just What the Doctor Ordered

Let the record show that Val is medicated. Not heavily medicated. Not the good stuff. Just her regular prescriptions that she takes each morning. One pill upon arising, for her missing thyroid, and two for blood pressure that she takes at least an hour later. Sometimes more than an hour later, but the deal with the thyroid med is to wait at least 30 minutes to an hour before ingesting anything else.

Most days, I put off the blood pressure med until I'm heading home from town. If you've ever taken such a pharmaceutical, you understand. It works to lower your blood pressure by getting rid of some of your blood volume. That's what I think, anyway. Because you have to pee out that extra fluid when the med decides it has to go. So I wait until I know that I'll be home in 10-15 minutes, where peeing facilities are available.

This timing is no big deal. I sleep late because I stay up late, and my body is used to the schedule, just as it was when I was working and took the thyroid pill at 4:50 a.m. and the others at 6:00. I have a little square container that I put my pills in. I slip that container in my shirt pocket, and once in T-Hoe, I put it in my change cup that sits on the console. Once I get my 44 oz Diet Coke, I take the two pills and start home.

Last Thursday, I had some extra running around to do. It was almost 1:00 when I left town to head home. I had a slight headache, which I attributed to being out in normal air, and not the rarefied atmosphere of my dark basement lair. There's all kinds of allergens in the air these days, and my nose drips like a faucet during my evening walk. As I was on the road home, it dawned on me that maybe my head hurt because I hadn't taken my blood pressure medicine yet! I had forgotten. So I reached into the change cup, but didn't feel my little square container.

Huh. That was odd. I KNOW I put it in the car. I felt my pocket. Not there. WAIT! The last I remembered seeing it, I had set that little square container on the console itself as I left Country Mart, in order to count out correct change for my next stop, the gas station chicken store, for my 44 oz Diet Coke. AND, as I had driven off from Country Mart, I heard something fall. I didn't dwell on it at the time. I though it might have been the coin cup sliding back off my phone onto the console, or that pair of nail clippers that The Pony kept in there for trimming his toenails as I drove. Forgetting that I had destroyed the clippers (accidentally!!!) the week before.

Anyhoo...I spent that drive home thinking about finding those pills so I could take them. The plan was to look in the back seat area when I stopped to pick up the mail. I reached my arm back and felt all around, but there was no little square container within reach. Things like that bother me. I wanted the issue resolved.

When I got to the mailboxes, I pulled over on the gravel road, beside the creek. No need to be parked in the county road while conducting my search. I climbed out of T-Hoe and looked on the floor, under the seats, under some junk in between the back seats. Looked in from EVERY DOOR. Under every seat. Under the floor mats. All over that car! I couldn't find my little square container.

For 15 minutes I searched. I was determined to find that little square container. Sweat was rolling off me in rivulets. In front of my ears from my scalp. Between my shoulder blades. I had a river of underboob and 'tween-boob sweat flowing under my shirt. Nowhere. That little square container was nowhere to be found. But I DID find a Slim Jim wrapper (empty), a wooden token for a free sundae at Dairy Queen, and two pennies and a dime (this was the day after I found my last penny on the Save A Lot parking lot).

For a third time (it's a charm, you know!) I checked the driver's seat between the console and the seat belt hook bolted to the floor. I FELT IT! I felt the little square container! It was in that little recess by the hook. There was some sort of plastic cover over the hook, and the little square container was wedged in there. I sat in the driver's seat and contorted my arm and wrist and fingers, but that little square container only jammed in deeper. I couldn't pry it out of that little hole.

I got out and stood beside the car and leaned over the seat, trying to wedge my arm down in there for better leverage. I have fairly small wrists if you consider a man's arm trying to fit in there. Smaller than a small man's wrists, unless by small man you think of Tom Thumb, who of course being retired all these years from the P.T. Barnum Circus, and taking a break from the grave, would probably not have desired to go poking around the floorboards of T-Hoe just to find two pills for Val.

I moved to the back seat door, where I could reach in sideways and not downways. Something kind of cracked, but I'm not going to tell Hick, because when is he ever going to notice, really, if I broke something in that area? FINALLY I fished out that little square container. I climbed back in T-Hoe, opened it up, and took my two pills.

If Hick borrows T-Hoe, and has to slam on the brakes, and goes sailing through the windshield when his seatbelt gives way...nobody's going to say anything, right?