Of Pills and Produce

Yesterday afternoon, after all the snow finally blew away, I went to Sheridan, 32 miles north of here, to pick up my prescriptions at Walgreen’s.  Bet you think that’s a long way to go, but I figure most people in big cities probably spend the same amount of time in the car as I do. That  32 miles I do is all I-90, with maybe 10 cars I see, at 75 mph, getting me there in less than 30 minutes, unless the roads are bad. Yesterday, the roads were fine, a few snow snakes had made slick spots, but all in all, just lovely considering it’s January in Wyoming!

Around here we stock up every time we go to Sheridan in the winter because you just never know when we are going to be hit with a good storm.  I say “good” because I just love winter. Call me crazy, I know. But here’s the thing…you can put ON more clothes when you are cold and you can take a nice hot soaky bath…but when it’s hot, you can’t rip off your skin, you are just HOT.  To me there is a beauty in winter, a starkness that cries out to me. I like the way the dry snow around here twinkles like it’s glitter and that when you shut a door the snow just falls off. I like walking through the woods and knowing that if there’s a moose or an elk or a (God forbid) mountain lion, I’m going to see his tracks before I accidently get too close. Oh, and we actually have snowshoe rabbits around here!  Their tracks are so cool!

Another thing I like about winter is that we get our little town back for a while from the tourists. In the summer, Buffalo is bustling with people from all over, but in winter, it’s so quiet.  We all wave at each other, glad to see that we recognize the faces in all the cars again. Everyone rides around with one hand at the top of their steering wheel and you’ll either get a full set of fingers lifted at you or if you are going up a steep hill in town, it might just be an index finger pointed straight up in greeting. But, it’s an acknowledgement  that “Hey, there’s a local!”  We do it a little more desperately in the summer time, when our tourists are stopping for no apparent reason, causing us to brake and curse, then wave nicely (we do want them to drop their money here)

Anyway, so I went to get my meds. I’m hardly on any at the moment.  My choice.. and the fact that my nasty little companion, the virus, is now resistant to everything they’ve invented so far. I’m only taking Cymbalta and Topomax for my neuropathy now. If you have this problem, let me tell you those are wonder drugs.  I also still take Acyclovir to keep me from blooming in shingles (I got them in 1998 for the first time and now blossom every spring with them, despite the drugs) and Dapsone to keep me from getting a certain deadly pneumonia that is lurking in my body, just waiting to re-appear.  Other than that, I only take Garlic, Biotin, Green Tea Extract, Zyrtec (for allergies) CLA and Alpha Lipoic Acid.  I did a clinical trial back at Hopkins years ago because I got diagnosed with AIDS related dementia (no, it’s nothing like alzheimer’s) and I was really having memory problems.  The kind where I’d be driving my stick shift car and look down at the stick and wonder what the hell THAT was for.. for just a few seconds before it came back to me. The docs explained that my neurons are not communicating correctly.  Anyway, I did this trial and they used the ALA and CLA in high doses.  It actually has reversed my brain problems…I don’t think I’d be able to write if it didn’t, eh?  My MRI still shows big areas of damage in my brain but except for forgetting people’s names a lot and I can’t remember phone numbers….I  do pretty well.  I do forget words a lot but they come to me, if Rob will just give me a minute to think it thru…ha, that’s another story…he’s always finishing my sentences, the turd!  Luckily, both CLA and ALA are over the counter now. I used to have to buy the powder and stuff my own pills because I need to take 1200 mg of the ALA. When it first came out over the counter, you could only get 25 mg caps, that’s a lot of freaking capsules to swallow a day!

You’ll notice I didn’t mention taking any vitamins? Doc says you should never eat vitamins in a pill. You should be getting all you need in your food and your body really only recognizes that anyway. You are just wasting your money on all those vitamins. Eat an orange, steam some broccoli.  I get all my vitamin C from Cayenne Pepper. I put it on just about everything now. Took me a bit to work my way up to more than a dash (it’s HOT) but now I don’t like food without it.

Another day, I’ll talk about my diet.  In a nutshell, I don’t eat anything that comes out of a package.  I only eat fresh fruit and veggies and greek yogurt , a tiny bit of cheese and I only eat chicken or fish twice a week.  I don’t eat any red meat unless I go to the Invasion Bar in Kaycee where they have the best burgers in all of WY….a girl can only be so deprived. But I really pay for that.  Once you stop eating all that dense stuff, your body becomes accustomed to the “lightness” and you get very sick from meat.

Anyway, I’m seeing here I’m starting to ramble again.  Thank you all for letting me into your lives today. I hope you have a wonderful day and treat everyone you see with kindness….

Remember…Leave a fingerprint of your humanity with a stranger today - a smile or a kind word. It might seem as worthless as lipstick on a napkin to you, but it may linger as a tattoo on someone's else's soul. We do not always know who needs for us to exist in any given moment in their lives, in order for them to make it through another day.~unknown