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I’m having one of those days where I feel like a walking, talking pharmacy. I’d rattle if you shook me. Tablets, capsules, caplets, big ones, little ones, brightly coloured ones… I’m full of them. My main problem with this drug taking malarkey is that I get so terribly bored with the whole thing and so stop taking them! In a similar way to when I have the same thing for lunch for two weeks and get fed up with toast and marmite, I swallow all these tablets for weeks on end and just get tired of taking them. Unfortunately it has a rather more serious effect on me than just forgoing the old yeast extract. My mum threatened me with a days-of- the-week pill box a while back. That was enough to get me taking them regularly again. For a couple of weeks anyway!

Why can’t something be done to combine all my necessary drugs and supplements into one perfect little pill? Made-to-measure tablets. I’m sure there’s a market for it. Scientists – get up off your posteriors and start work!

Worryingly, I’m not the greatest when it comes to reading labels either. Earlier this year the doc gave me some lovely new painkillers (which incidentally turned me into something of a wreck for the first few days, much to the amusement of my beloved family!). I took them as you would most tablets; stuck them on the back of my tongue, took a good glug of water and off they went down my pharynx (ooh check me and my medical terminology out!) to do their analgesic work. I did notice that the taste was remarkably strong, but a lot of tablets do have that nasty tang. It was only four days later that my mum noticed the label indicating that these particular ones were to be dissolved in water before consumption. No wonder they’d tasted bad, they’d been dissolving on my tongue! Oops. Well if they will go and use a word like ‘dispersible’! What’s wrong with soluble or even dissolvable? Dispersing is what you do to a rowdy crowd! I told my mum that I’d read the label properly next time. She didn’t seem to believe me. Can’t think why.

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