Playing Russian Roulette in the Morning

The day did not start well. We were out of sugar, so I drank only half my usual intake of coffee, shuddering at the bitter taste. Consequently, I was dragging through my morning routine.

Among my responsibilities was the task of dispensing the daily vitamins and supplements for my wife and myself. I uncapped the various containers and extracted the required content, accumulating them in a small ceramic bowl to be divided out between us. 2 Vitamin D’s, the winter vitamins-- check. 2 Probiotics for digestion-- check. 4 Barley Green capsules-- check. 2 Omega 3-6-9’s-- check. Then from their individual containers the male and female Supervitamins (the pride of the lot)-- check... Whoa! Without thinking, I had dumped both Supervitamins into the common pool without properly segregating them. Now in the mix of pills, two Supervitamins were mocking me. Like identical twins, like peas in the pod, there was no way of identifying them. No markings at all. Now what? They are only vitamins, most people would dismiss with a shrug but be dead wrong. These are the leading edge of pharmaceutical technology that cost billions to develop and now the consumer has to pay back every penny. (It is probably on the list of prohibited substances for Olympic athletes because they are that powerful.)

I considered the situation carefully. Men and women have different bodily needs and require a gender-specific mix of supplements to maintain proper body chemistry. It is therefore essential that the right pill go to the intended recipient. The problem was that I could not decipher which pill was which. They were large, colourful, striated with the various components that dissolved, broken down into radicals that like tiny keys floated around searching for a specific lock to open for some beneficial result. What would the keys do when they could not mate with the lock they were designed for? I just didn’t know. This had never happened before. I usually popped the male-pill into my mouth right away, but this morning the brain was still sluggish ... and look what resulted -- a catastrophe.

I calculated my probabilities. I had a 50-50 chance of picking the proper pill. Right. But the other half of the 50-50, of being wrong, bothered me. What were the risks? That if I chose wrong, I would get a load of estrogen-enhancing additives. Could my system deal with the shock? And what about my wife? Could she sustain a testosterone spike? I mean I wouldn’t want her to sprout a mustache, and I definitely didn’t want swellings in the wrong places.

I explained the dilemma to my wife as we ingested the rest of the pills and sat staring at the remaining two Supervitamins. They are murderously expensive (that’s why they were so effective-- right?) so they could not be simply thrown away and be replaced with a new set. My wife also didn’t want to take the wrong pill. We stared at the bowl with the two large pills that even under the best of circumstances, needed two mouthfuls of liquid to wash them past the throat.

“It’s like Russian Roulette,” I said speculatively, “though the odds are worse.”

“How worse?” my wife queried.

“In Russian Roulette the gun has a single bullet for the six chambers, but here . . .” I enunciated carefully to highlight the problem, “our chances are reduced to only one in two.”

“Isn’t one in two better than one in six?” my wife asked.

“In the case of choosing right, yes. But not in the case of choosing wrong.”

She blinked at me, and I was no longer sure if I was semantically correct. Right? Wrong? That led to a longer discussion that somehow ended up on communication styles. Males and females have different objectives. Again reinforcing the need for separate pills.

The long and short of it was that we decided to leave it up to luck. I donned a blindfold and reached into the bowl to fish out a pill. I swallowed it as quickly as I could, though this time it took a lot more water to get it past my apprehensive throat.

“How did it taste?” my wife asked.

“Taste?”

“Like the usual?” she persisted and she had a point. Different sort of pill ought to taste different-- right? Right. The trouble was I never paid much attention to how the usual tasted. I was too busy getting it down before the taste could hit me. But why was it all up to me anyway?

“You tell me,” I said, motioning to the lone, remaining pill.

With visible reluctance she put it in her mouth and braved the taste to unfold.

“Well?” I prompted.

She just shrugged her shoulders. “It tastes normal to me.” And that was that.

Not quite. Throughout the day I keep checking on myself. Was I experiencing something unusual? What if the strange chemicals were causing untoward side effects?

When the phone rang I nearly jumped out of my seat. Was that something? I watched my wife closely to see if she was experiencing any strangeness. But she just looked and acted normal.

Later I talked longer than usual with my telephone buddy, experiencing a strange reluctance to hang up. Was that significant? Watching a prime time movie, I teared up. Now that was rare. All day I had worried that I had taken the wrong pill and the various ingredients had nowhere to go, no specific sites to target according to their design purpose, so they were wandering aimlessly around my system looking for something to do, unleashing a host of incongruities. When I actually found myself interested in the credits at the end of the show, I KNEW I had taken the wrong pill. I just had to wonder how long it would take to leech out the foreign substances and re-balance my system.

Next morning all went well. The proper vitamins were ingested. However while eating my bowl of cereal, my eyes caught the claim on the box: “... fortified with all essential vitamins and nutritional supplements to strengthen and bolster you and your immune system ...” I kept wondering which “you” they were talking about. The male or the female you? And could I really trust them?

Paul Tee