There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Fantomestein
Beka Duke
Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Countdown to Countdown
Velinxi
Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
Beeserker
TJ Cordes
This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
Slightly Damned
Chu
Rhea Snaketail returns from the dead, befriending a Demon who falls in love with an Angel. The afterlife ain't what it used to be!
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
2 Slices
RJ Morel
After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
The Otherknown
Lorian Merriman
Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
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My own experience with university health services doctors would suggest otherwise. That was the only time in my life I’ve ever gotten “I’m the doctor here” from any doctor.
(I had a sinus infection. My sinus infections are amoxicillin-resistant. I asked for doxycycline, and explained why. Cue above line. Three miserable days later I’m back. Fortunately she was at least capable of learning and didn’t pull that stunt again. She was still the worst doctor I’ve ever had, and I was stuck with her for four years, they wouldn’t let me switch.)
I have no specific knowledge in this case, but I will say, “never underestimate the petty unhelpfulness of professional bureaucrats.” Sometimes you’ll get one who actually sees it as their responsibility to leverage their knowledge of their organization’s systems and policies in service to the needs of outsiders needing aid, but more often any given functionary is (or chooses to behave as) a nearly-thoughtless drone who does only what they must do to avoid disciplinary action. And sometimes you’ll be confronted with someone who wields whatever measure of administrative power their position holds as a weapon, inflating their own ego by capriciously abusing others through the authority they control. Such active malice (particularly when not motivated by more specific antipathy) is pretty rare – much less common than the genuinely helpful type, and almost invisible when scattered among the great mass of disinterested drones – but it can be pretty remarkable how much misery they can generate without suffering any consequences of their own.
That’s especially egregious at a university where there’s a significantly better than average chance the person you’re treating is studying something relevant, or is in regular contact with someone who is.
It’s really not that hard to personally know a couple of Med students in uni. Or microbiology. Or Pharmacology…
When I take my meds, I first put some water/drinking liquid in my mouth, then push the pill between my lips, then swallow. That way, I never have to taste them.
my go to method to minimize tasting chance is to chuck them into my mouth as hard as I can and tilt my head back at the same time so they hopefully land beyond where I have any taste buds, and then I chug water until I can’t feel them no more
I take a swallow’s worth of water, chuck the pill in, and gulp it before my tongue knows what hit it.
Pills are bitter, but usually not that bad. More tolerable than cough syrup “cherry” and that “citrus” stuff that tasted like vomit. (Artificial grape is at least palatable, even if it’s more “allegedly grape shoe polish” than “Mott’s”.)
SAME.
Also, since having to take a painkillar that was bitter as heck, i’ve gotten used to a technique that encases the pill in water in my mouth, preventing it from touching my taste buds, i even do it with non-bitter pills now.
That’s what I do for pills! For the longest time I tried with water and couldn’t do it. That’s the only way I was told how. Dry swallowing pills changed my life. So easy!
I don’t see what the problem is with taking pills, my bedtime meds total 7 pills, 6 that have to be swallowed whole and one that has to dissolve under my tongue to be effective. I take all 6 pills at once with just a little water no problem. Of course it helps I have been taking multiple pills every day since the truck hit me in 2001, so I’m used to it.
It depends a lot on the person. My mother has been taking a variety of daily meds for years, but still has issues sometimes. (Due to an esophageal web, she has occasional issues with swallowing anything.) OTOH, I rarely have any trouble swallowing pills, even without water. Then again, my total pill intake in the past year was probably about half a dozen ibuprofen.
my birth control actually *helped* me with pills; triquilar is the second-smallest pill I’ve ever had, and has a nice slick coating that lasts long enough for at least two attempts. getting my throat used to accepting a tiny pill every day made it easier to navigate getting the occasional larger pill down. relatively speaking.
also esophagus issues are fucking bullshit! uuuggghhhhhh I want a new esophagus, damnit. instead I’m stuck on pills that are bad for my bones (and don’t have as nice a coating as triquilar).
Destiny’s Child as in the group Beyoncé used to be a part of. I assume (not being all that familiar with them) that this is a reference to their song Bills, Bills, Bills.
The first time I was prescribed pills I had to swallow (antibiotics course), I couldn’t do it. I was maybe 10 at the time. I tried several times, then tried chewing it– that was gross. After that, I just pretended to take the pills each day while actually wrapping them in tissue and throwing them out. Luckily, my toe healed without issue, and everyone said I did a good job.
It is funny because I was the opposite. The doctor had to make an exception and give me pills when I was four, because liquid medication made me retch every time. (My gran’s conviction that Syrup of Fig would fix whatever ailed you was challenged by the fact I would IMMEDIATELY spew it all over the floor.)
I learned to take pills at 4 because I was a brittle asthmatic and HATED the taste of theophylline syrup so much.
Theophylline is a hard core asthma med they don’t use much anymore. It’s so hazardous you need weekly blood work to make sure it’s not poisoning your heart or liver. In the 90s it came in this godawful syrup that somehow had a clingy mouth feel and was simultaneously sweet and so bitter it almost hurt. I hated that stuff so much.
They also used to offer albuterol in syrup form for kids who were severe asthmatics and that also tasted terrible. I was really prone to getting sudden severe attacks where I’d get too tight to breathe enough for a Neb or MDI to work so they’d use the syrup to get some rescue med in while we went to the hospital.
oh wow. My meds are slightly unpleasant/metallic tasting but they aren’t sticky. they’re safe and they work and i basically just need to remember to take them and get my prescriptions refilled.
I didn’t realize that asthma was so difficult to treat so recently. It explains how asthma used to be depicted on television.
I was around the same age, and they were an antibiotic for my fiftieth ear infection or something. I swear those things were the size of M&Ms, or at least bigger than ibuprofen.
When i was a kid I’d get throat infections yearly and had to drink down this god awful thick white liquid antibiotic. It tasted and felt like they put dry pills in a blender with paint. My parents had to do the Mary Poppins thing and shove sugar in my mouth as soon as I took it or I’d be wretching. I was so happy once i got old enough to take pills that it immediately outshone any issues with swallowing them
They didn’t exactly get away with it—Huey Lewis sued and Ray Parker quickly settled.
However! The settlement included a confidentiality agreement, and after Huey went on VH1 Behind the Music and said Ray Parker stole his song, Parker sued him for breach of confidentiality and won some money back.
Birth control pills are blessedly tiny. They were actually my first experience in successfully swallowing a pill. For the first 2 weeks they dissolved on my tongue every time before I could manage to get them down, but after a month or two I managed to swallow them most of the time. Ten years later I can swallow all but the biggest pills with no trouble but big ones are still iffy
Yeah. Taking Yaz/Yasmin was just like popping candy. I never could remember to take them at the same time every day, but I’d just put them under my tongue and let them dissolve when I did remember, which was about once a day. (Yeahh… don’t be like me when it comes to taking BC pills, folks.)
I have to take pills at around the same time of day FOUR times a day. Also I take multiple pills at a time . I couldn’t swallow pills at all until my early 20s (I’d throw up every time I tried) and now I can swallow a little handful of them with a sip of water.
I never had issues with swallowing pills. When they’re small enough I’m usually to lazy to go and get a glass of water, and I just swallow them dry. Then recently I learned that for some medication the water isn’t just to help you swallow it but mainly to protect your stomach lining… which is also why it says in the instructions “with a glass of water”, not just with a sip…
So yeah, I’ve been doing it wrong all along.
I agree. Joyce’s parents seem like they don’t believe in psychiatry, but considering how controlling they are, it’d be worse if they did. There’s a lot of enabling psych people out there, and the medications can cause more harm than good, especially if used improperly/prescribed off-label.
Like maybe she could see a therapist, or something, so long as it’s not ABA or ERT since those are both abuse.
Joyce’s problems that affect Joyce’s body and Joyce’s personal life are not “brattiness”. Even if she were choosing to be like this – and to be clear, she is not – it’s really not okay for you to say that.
Joyce, as a cartoon character, can have as many neuroses as Willis can write for her. I commented once that he didn’t refer to the DSM-5 as he developed his characters but I’m starting to revise that idea.
I sure hope not. The DSM may not list homosexuality as a “mental disorder” anymore, but there’s still a lot of systematic bigotry integrated into that fucking thing.
I indeed look forward to the day autism is no longer considered a “disorder” because of harmless traits contrary to what long standing social institutions tend to value.
That will be a sad and terrifying day because once it’s no longer considered a disorder schools and workplaces will no longer be required to make reasonable accommodations for autistic people.
What she isn’t telling you is that Joyce hasn’t taken a pill in over 30 years. That’s right Joyce is actually a very young looking 48! Why? She never takes pills!
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall
Yes, yes, yes! I listened to that vinyl record almost every day after school when I was a kiddo! First song I ever learned to play on the piano. Heavenly.
I can’t relate with this one, sorry, Joyce. I can’t remember when I switched from taking my seizure meds with apple juice in a syringe to just swallowing them and going. I only have a hard time with long or fat pills now.
15 Neuroses in a Trench Coat.doesn’t work as a band name, but it would do just fine as a handle for the next social media environment life forces me to join.
I feel like you’re probably just being snarky here, but I can’t be sure. This was literally how I learned to take pills, which I struggled with for a long time.
Well, yes. And I’m glad it worked for you Devin. But, while I can see why peanut butter would work, applesauce is liquidy enough that I don’t really understand how it would help.
Applesauce is thick enough to suspend a pill in at least long enough to swallow it. As long as it’s a pill with a coating it doesn’t even really start to dissolve much.
There’s a bit of a spectrum on applesauces, and a slightly thicker one is better, but essentially it works to suspend the payload such that you don’t even notice it going down. And there’s no instinct to chew because it’s so liquidy, even the thicker ones. I’ve also noticed several other commenters have had similar success.
I’ve also had success with yogurt, yes! I hate the texture of Jell-O so I’ve never tried that, but if you can get it in and not just sitting on top I see no reason why it wouldn’t work!
Sadly this strip adds some credence to that moment Becky and Dorothy slightly compared Joyce to a dog arguing they’d have to hide birth control pills in her peanut butter. I didn’t like that somewhat insulting take from them. I hope this is an opportunity for Joyce to prove them wrong.
I do appreciate the irony that it’s not for the reason they thought it would be. Or maybe Becky knows about this too. It would make sense that she would.
Period undies are a GAME changer, for folks who can’t really keep up with pads or rags or tampons or rubber cups … just wash n wear. Wish I’d discovered them sooner!
From what I’ve heard period undies aren’t really great for people with heavy flows (such as myself). I can bleed through a combo of a super+ tampon and a pad in less than 2 hours on a bad week, I wouldn’t trust period undies.
Well, your mileage may vary. Sorry to hear about your heavy flows!
I find this particular brand to be just as absorbent as the super heavy flow overnight pads. I’ve always bled profusely & abnormally, and these worked for me, particularly when doubled up with a pad on top. It’s important to keep a change around and a zip-loc bag, just in case. But everyone experiences menstruation differently.
Got an IUD 2 months ago — still bleeding all the time, and got an iron deficiency from it, but the pain and cramping is much better now. I do think it will help in the end, even though getting it is a nightmare. I’m just glad there are so many options these days.
For heavy flow (I have a SERIOUSLY heavy flow) I found that period undies + menstrual cup are a great duo. Just have to give it a few days to get comfy taking the cup in and out (which I have to do every few hours on my first few days) but any leakage is caught by the period undies so it works fine.
Yes, it’s still a judgment. I think the purity culture taboos about putting things into your vagina (including for entirely non-sexual purposes) are hot fucking bullshit, and if I was in a conversation with someone insisting that using tampons would make them a slut or take away their virginity (stupid concept anyway!) I’d push back on that, but there are lots and lots of very good reasons why someone might not choose or even be able to use tampons, including psychological discomfort, and that psychological discomfort can stem from other sources besides religious indoctrination/trauma. Shame and mockery are not useful reactions to someone’s psychological aversions about *their own bodies*, no matter where they come from.
No one deserves to be shamed or judged for their comfort level with their genitals. Using tampons over pads isn’t some kind of marker of adulthood that Joyce has failed to achieve, and I find the implication that it is to be icky.
The implication I got wasn’t anything about “marker of adulthood”, but exactly that “Oh right, Joyce was probably raised in that fucking hot bullshit purity culture.”
You might be right. *I* don’t feel that generous about completely unnecessary comments about how anyone handles their period, but I’ll cop to be carrying my own baggage on this one.
I don’t wanna go into great detail on that, but I will say that women shaming women for NOT using tampons is also a thing, and weirdly, men sometimes have thoughts on this that no one in the history of ever asked for or wanted, but they’ll offer them anyway. (They shouldn’t.)
Generally I think beyond outlining the options available and making some nicely factual arguments for and against (menstrual cups: cheapest! Tampons: easiest to handle in public restrooms! Pads: actually I hate pads! But honestly sometimes they’re the most immediately convenient solution!), people should shut the fuck up about how menstruating people are handling their periods and yes even if you don’t think their reasons for picking one option or another are valid. This is a very loaded and emotional topic and that is *not* just my own baggage speaking.
Remember when she found Sarah’svibrator, or her total ignorance about ‘strap-ons’ and not knowing what size she would wear? I made the assumption of ‘pads, not tampons’ in my post based solely on Joyce’s backstory – and yes, the ‘purity culture’ under which I’m sure she was raised. Anyone trying to read anything further into that is just wasting their time.
I am fully willing to take you at your word on this! No judgment intended. That is cool.
But…please do understand that this is an area where people who have periods often have to deal with a *tremendous* amount of judgment and grossly invasive questioning or insensitive comments about how they manage them. It might be invisible to you, but it is out there, and it’s not abstract to the people who get hit with it. (Not everyone who has a period does. But a LOT of people do.)
Plenty of women use pads instead of tampons for a variety of reasons. Tampons are not for everyone and I’m not sure why you’ve got any opinion at all about what other people use to manage their periods.
the first time I needed to take a pill I couldn’t do it so my mom crushed it up and put it in a tablespoon of water for me to drink and it tasted so horrible that I immediately learned how to swallow pills
I’ve been searching “Oravax” and “Oramed” in the news every couple days for the past 2 and a half years — when the oral COVID vaccine comes out, it’s going to be a game changer for the folks with needle phobias. I really hope it comes out soon, and gets appropriately publicized when it does.
The form of delivery of a medication matters.
OK, …new game?
What search terms do you search for, day after day, in your news aggregator of choice?
“This is the song that never ends.
It just goes on and on my friend!
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was.
And they’ll continue singing it forever just because
this is the song that never ends…”
There’s probably a way to set up an alert for that word and relevant info when it comes to your area , i had a shot tho luckily it only took a couple seconds and not a huge needle/is preferable than having your blood drawn
You haven’t heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, which has a free trial up to level 60 that includes the award-winning expansion Heavensward with no restrictions on play time?
I recall Final Fantasy back around 20+ years ago… a friend played it all weekend, not even stopping to sleep, and barely stopping to eat or use the restroom. Fun times…
Queen Anthai seems to have handled the FF explanation via copypasta, so I’ll only add that I’ve been playing for a little over two years now and it’s been a huge boon to my mental health. If you have a machine that can play it (PS4, equivalent PC), I recommend at least checking it out. If it’s not your style though, I’m not their PR department, so I got no stake in it.
RWBY is a 3D CGI cartoon with a heavy anime influence and a heavy influence from fables and fairy tales, originally created by a fellow named Monty Oum. He unfortunately died after Season 3, but Rooster Teeth (the folks behind Red vs Blue) picked it up and it’s gonna be in Season 9 soon. Its efforts at political commentary are frequently ham-fisted and sometimes outright tone-deaf, but I genuinely enjoy the overall plot and character interactions. Plus everyone is a cool X-Men superhero with weapons that switch between melee and gun modes, so there’s a lot of fight porn that’s okay-ish at worst and stellar most of the time.
RWBY has nothing to do with Final Fantasy, but one of its original creators, Monty Oum, got some of his clout by creating a series called Dead Fantasy. It was characters from Dead or Alive beating up characters from Final Fantasy.
I loved Dead Fantasy and am still somewhat bitter it never got finished, partially due to RWBY.
I’d say his sudden and unforseen death had a big hand in that, too. RWBY was kind of his real passion project, from what I can tell, so I can’t fault him. Plus, Square Enix is notoriously shitty about any use of their characters that isn’t directly controlled by their out-of-touch suits, so it’s likely he would have had to stop before much longer anyway.
I used to have a search for bicycle wrecks that was delivered 2 or 3 times a day to my inbox which then went into my blog with commentary on how infrastructure or different rider behavior would have prevented the wreck, until I came to the conclusion that people driving cars and trucks was the problem and the built environment not working unless you were driving a car being a major factor in that. Eventually after 8 years of writing about the carnage I had to quit, because it wasn’t helping anybody except maybe the relatives of the victims.
I don’t really do news but when I get the urge to go to pixiv/deviantart i always search to see if there’s new Arlong art cus he’s got a sick design
and that’s when i learned it was very important to give your characters a last name, because if the name is too simple you can get Arlong from One Piece, Ouran from the Final Fantasy with Tidus, Riley from the Lucario Pokemon movie, Ovan from .hack/gu, or other media. And all I want is the dumb shark guy.
i feel like i get info for games and artists off twitter or discord so i dont need to search anymore
It took me until halfway through middle school to be able to swallow pills by myself. Until then, my mother would have to place the pill on my tongue and flick it down my throat.
…learning to swallow pills made hanging out with friends so much easier.
Like alot of kids I had trouble swallowing pills. Then my mom gave me what I think an anti biotic I wouldn’t swallow it I instead chewed it and immediately and violently threw up from that point on I had no trouble swallowing medication.
Sounds like metronidazole. That shit tastes like poison and I once let it melt on my tongue (similarly struggling to swallow it) and immediately vomited as well.
I was about 6 so it was unlikely metronidazole I think it might have been a either a steroid or anti biotic I can’t remember which I had something was exercerbating my asthma that wasn’t pneumonia
But yeah moral is don’t chew pills that aren’t chewable.
a light snack might help but unless the taste is better/you get used to it, i can imagine it backfiring and you end up finding it tedious/liking your fave food a little less
Question from a guy (who has never taken birth control, obviously)… Would a woman actually start taking the pill in the middle of her period? I would have thought it would be something you time to begin after your period ends.
There are the sugar pills that you take so you still have a period but you keep with the habit. But I’ve never started taking the pill during a period so I wouldn’t know.
There are also period medications that you take for your entire cycle (which sometimes helpfully stop or stem menstrual flow) so it could be one of those, too.
A few years ago, as I recall, they started putting out birth control for guys. The guys were huge babies about it and bawled their pathetic fragile tears about how “difficult” it was for them. That’s where my knowledge ends on the subject, because a body can only roll their eyes so far back without risking permanent damage.
I seem to recall a public health experiment in NYC years back, about a particular flavored lube that enhanced sensation and prevented HIV transmission at the same time. I don’t recall whether it was also contraceptive, but it might have been. See, we need more fun-based public health initiatives like that…
there were actually genuinely bad symptoms, that yes, people taking oestrogen/progesterone contraceptives today have because they were approved in the past under shitty conditions like ‘oh women are just complaining i’m sure it’s not that bad’. I got suicidal ideation on the last hormonal contraceptive I tried (AFTER 3-6 months so not just based on the ‘change’ in hormone levels but after my body got used to it). but sure, men are just whining when it happens to them.
I think the problem is less that “men are just whining” but that women are just sort of expected to deal with the exact same if not similar problems with very little research or effort going into anything that could make it better, whereas even the option for men to take that sort of thing on in a women’s stead wasn’t even considered, because the idea of even giving men the option to go through what women are merely expected and are often forced to go through is unthinkable. We’ll just…continue to expect/force women to deal with shitty options until men feel comfortable. Great.
To be fair, birth control medication for men is also a harder problem technically. There isn’t really a natural process to co-opt as there is with woman.
I don’t know enough about the trials in question to know how they compare with women’s birth control, but something like Opus describes seems like not really an attractive option.
Yes, actually, men are just whining when they act like the same shit women get put through just because “that’s how it is” is suddenly a novel problem that someone should really do something about. It’s so unacceptable if a man has a little bit of a mood swing from some medicine, but women have to put up with everything up to and including organ removal just to regulate some body functions, with very few reasonable options that provide any degree of comfort, which are inevitably mocked as women being too delicate? Yes. Male tears boohoo.
On a more personal level, I really am sorry you went through all that, genuinely. Suicidal ideation fucking sucks and I wouldn’t wish it on basically anybody. My rude remarks are for Men Overall, not any specific man, and I do apologise if I made you feel targeted.
I was on the alpha test for that, it didn’t work completely, and it caused ED so it wasn’t so much birth control as sex preventing. This was during the 80s so maybe they have something that reduces sperm count to 0 without causing ED. But yeah that first attempt was a disaster.
Reminds me of when I found my kitten and had to give her antibiotics pills – a fight every day. She HATED me.
Did you know there’s no actual proof for the “you need to take your antibiotics until the end or you’ll be producing resistant bacteria” thing? They proposed it as an idea to be careful about right at the beginning of antibiotics use, and nobody bothered to check it until fairly recently – turns out for most diseases, it doesn’t really matter.
So yeah, I stopped the kitten antibiotics early ><
I thought you were supposed to take the antibiotics to the end just to be sure you actually got everything and they aren’t sitting there, lurking, ready to multiply again and make you go for a second round.
Yes, Sol, it’s the same argument. You “make sure you actually got everything” because, by this argument, the ones you *didn’t* get are the ones which are more resistant to the antibiotic and you really don’t want them to “make you go for a second round” especially since they’ve now multiplied into an otherwise empty field.
Yeah, exactly this. There are some diseases where it’s crucial to kill off all the bacteria because otherwise they’ll come back – I don’t remember the details, I think inner ear infection it was? But usually the immune system gets around to cleaning the leftovers. And for stomach bugs it’s just a game of numbers anyway and you’re probably better off not killing too many good bacteria.
cats seem difficult to deal with if you’re not used to them, would maybe be easier for the vet to have done so or pass it on to another person so they wouldn’t keep their distance from you more, but hope your cat was ok
It depends more on the cat than anything else. I’ve had some where pilling them was easy. Some where you could trick them with pill pockets or just hiding it in their food. And others where it was an epic battle involving blankets, pill syringes and significant blood.
Haha indeed. My kitten was like five weeks when I found her, so even the small pills were large for her. And she’s a FIGHTER. Even the vet was unable to keep her rolled in a towel XD
But yeah, she was fine And eventually started trusting my hands again.
because if you dont sync your pill with your first day that first month of your taking the pill will send your cycle out of wack. if you start it for hormone-mood-related purposes you will be even more prone to mood swings
That’s fine. There’s a lot of needless bullying and judgement around people being unable to do things that other people find easy.
For you, taking pills isn’t easy. That doesn’t make you less-than, it just means this thing isn’t easy for you.
For others, something you find easy might be very difficult. Think about how you would treat someone struggling with something you find easy… and then treat yourself that way about pills.
The constant focus on perfect assimilation into one version of “being an adult” is soul-crushing and completely not worth dealing with. Crushing a pill, cutting it up, putting it in applesauce, whatever it takes. All that matters is your health, the rest is just peer pressuring bullshit.
Thing is, it’s *not* a neurosis. Even in the most non-technical sense, this is just a simple physical aversion that is best treated as a *physical problem* – not a psychological one.
I’d suggest an occupational therapist or an SLP*, but that’s because of the pill swallowing plus the food aversions. Of course, getting somebody to help you with that as an adult – or even an older but not-yet-adult teen – is *really* not the easiest referral to find.
* SLPs don’t just handle speech and language like you’d expect, they handle all sorts of stuff related to the mouth and throat. Swallowing pills and food aversions are very much part of that.
It is possible to teach somebody how to take pills, though you gotta start small. Some people think “start with tic tacs”, but no, for a lot of people who have trouble swallowing pills tic tacs are already too big. When I insisted my niece learn, we started with *nerds*, and worked our way up to tic tacs, really slowly.
If possible, though, given Joyce’s food aversions and everything else, it’d probably be better for her to work with an occupational therapist than to try to DIY this.
I meant to also say that Joyce’s brothers having to hold her down to take pills is ABSOLUTELY THE WORST POSSIBLE “solution” to the problem. First, because it doesn’t actually teach her how to handle this on her own, and second, because it adds a layer of trauma to something that many people struggle with.
But the fundiegelical crowd does tend to be bigger on the punishment and brute force approach to parenting than actually teaching their kids.
My older kid can dry swallow pills but the younger one is terrified to try and from my own experience, I’m pretty sure hed vomit if we insisted. I thought about trying tic-tacs but I know they would have been too big for me at first. (I just brute forced my way through a month of birth control pills and eventually managed to swallow some before they dissolved & worked up from there)
Nerds is a great idea, I’m totally going to try that with my younger kid!!
I got the entire list we worked from, start to finish, from a website to help parents of kids with Cystic Fibrosis, of all things. IIRC, their suggested list went something like nerds – sort them from small to large, tictacs, mini m&ms, jelly belly jelly beans which are smaller than most brands, regular m&ms, good and plenty, regular jelly beans, mike and ike. Something like that. They also suggested that some kids who really are averse might be best served starting with *sprinkles*, which dissolve faster than nerds – so the kid thinks they swallowed a candy pill, but really not so much. Still, if it gets them over the initial hump….
And ALWAYS try to begin and end with a win, even if that means going down to a smaller size than you worked on that day.
You are not wrong. Sometime after we worked on pills, which I only did because she was developing the hereditary daily migraine habit and I forsaw a day when OTC pain meds no longer came in liquid format for her, she got some medical diagnoses which now cause her to take a wide variety of pills daily, and not a month goes by when I don’t glance at her pillbox and say “Man, I saved us a whole lot of grief there!”
Sometimes my sister or my niece says it instead of me.
I wonder whether drinking bubble tea with boba tapioca balls might help to practice the experience of washing down solid things with a drink, no chewing.
Ugh, anyone see the movie, “Maria Full of Grace”? That SCENE, where she swallows the grapes whole! Gag! Too much!
i know there’s pills bigger than tic tacs but feels awkward to swallow them when i’m used to biting them down lol but it would be nice if they added flavoring to ‘regular’ pills , i know not everyone’s a fan of cough medicine but the kind i’ve had isn’t too bad
Sarah, she’s like a cat. You’re just gonna have to lay her gently on the ground, throw a pill into the back of her mouth and stroke her throat until she swallows.
I’ve had dogs and cats (mostly dogs) who with pill pockets or pills that were wrapped in meat or cheese would chew the entire thing, swallow, then spit just the pill out.
For when those don’t work, they have little pill syringes. Just squirt the pill and some water into the back of her throat. Gets it past the teeth and the water triggers a swallow reflex.
luckily i don’t get dry/itchy eyes too often even with allergies but they do seem hard to put in, i always have to just drop it directly on while my eyes are closed and then blink/them seeping in rather than keeping my eye open
I was in college and had a horrible dental infection before I learned to swallow pills. Like I knew how in theory, and people had tried to get me to take them before (I puked immediately,) but nothing short of unrelenting pain could make me do it. And even then I had to lock myself in the bathroom and repeatedly choke myself trying to learn the timing, for like a solid hour. Same for trying contacts, except I never managed that. Too terrified that I’d get it in my eye and then not be able to get it OUT again. So yeah I totally relate to the horror of trying things that make you viscerally uncomfortable that everyone else insists are easy.
i do like chewable gummies but other than texture/added taste idk if it’s that much more effective. at least a smaller pill could be mixed into food/drinks
tho depending on how bad the pain is, a pill should be less effort
As a child I didn’t think the orange-flavoeed aspirin tasted mediciny enough. I now am at the point where I don’t need water to swallow Muconex. I think there’s a connection.
It’s not very good for you, but I find it easier to dry swallow pills. Pop in mouth, swallow. If I add water to the mix sometimes they try to float around my mouth or something
Many pills are less dense than water. Some people find it helps to tip the head down to take pills with water. At any rate, you can drink water before and after taking the pill if that works.
I’m still concerned that we don’t yet have a definitive diagnosis for the source of the pain. Is it endometriosis? Ovarian torsion? Cysts? It’s just the intermittent nature of it — only once every other month — that has me worried that this isn’t just “normal” pain.
Here’s how I would do it if I were the doctor:
Before anything: get a full GYN exam, maybe an ultrasound. Rule out any emergency medical condition. Then, once cause is determined…
Step 1: shot of Toradol. Immediate pain relief.
Step 2: prescription extended-release Motrin or Naproxen (smaller). If she wants to maintain the pain relief after the Toradol wears off, she’ll have to take the pill to keep the prostaglandins at bay. Powerful incentive.
Step 3: start taking the birth control pills (preferably Yaz, because that also has a calming effect) along with the regular pain medicine.
But I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one in a comic strip… :-/
And/or lidocaine patches on the lower back, behind the pelvis, hot water bottle, raspberry leaf and ginger mint tea, lots of dark chocolate, comfort foods, and an excuse from class until she’s feeling better.
Honestly, Joyce could probably use some of the pain medicines that have an anti-anxiety effect, but that’s a little more complicated to prescribe for someone who’s not a regular patient.
Bag of heated dry oats/rice across the lower belly + partner putting gentle pressure on the part of my back just above my tailbone. Completely kills them as long as I don’t move.
If I have to go somewhere, then it’s just pain relief and buckle-down.
Obviously every situation is different, but if taking the pills solves the problem is most cases, then you do that first. For those it doesn’t help, they come back and you try something else.
As long as there are limits on time and resources, I don’t think you can afford to do a complete physical on everyone who comes in. We don’t know exactly what was said at Joyce’s appointment, but if she presented with symptoms that 9 times out of 10 are solved with birth control medication, you give her birth control medication and tell her to come back if it doesn’t help. Subjecting someone who has shown an aversion to going to the doctor in the first place to potentially unnecessary medical procedures just seems needless hassle and potential traumatic.
She definitely needs someone who’ll try to actually diagnose her, but for anyone else: before I got my hysto (combo of gender-affirming care and uterus problem solving), heat pads were something that REALLY helped immensely, that I didn’t discover until after more than a decade of periods, and were what I relied on through the days following my second IUD insertion (this is when I decided to buy one, the doctor gave me one while I was resting immediately after), really painful periods, and uterine prolapse (leading to the hysterectomy), and I still use it for back, ab, and stomach cramps. I got a second one for christmas this year so I could keep one in the bedroom and one in the living room (in case anyone is wondering, I’ve not done any comparisons but mine are sunbeam XLheat king).
tl;dr period havers – try a heat pad if you haven’t.
Time to call Jocelyne! Maube she could help make Joyce accept the pills in her life once forever and without have to constantly use violence. I kinda want to see Dina’s reaction to Joyce’s though about pills.
(Should have used the word “something” rather than “anything” for clarity, and now it’s going to bother me until this part of the comments section gets eaten by data rot.)
I remember, but, see, that’s something she had to do in order to get through the day. I’m looking for any single solitary time where Joyce “choose” to do something her neuroses tells her not to, even if she could avoid it. Just to try and see if her immediate, visceral feelings might just possibly not be the final arbiter of what is good and correct.
Like, it tastes wrong? I’ve had that feeling myself. I think tomatoes taste wrong. Chicken a la Jacob definitely tastes wrong, with the bananas and shit. In fact, anything you do to bananas can only make them taste wrong. And don’t get me started on pölsa. But throughout my childhood my mom cooked these things because it was all she could afford, and I understood early on if I didn’t eat my fill of what she served I would just be in pain from hunger until breakfast, so I learned early on to eat what she made even when it tasted wrong and also bad. I wonder if Joyce has ever been mildly hungry, like when you don’t eat for 18 hours or so. She strikes me as having good survival instincts, but they have not been tried (aside from having a gun shoved in her face once). The reality of needing to do things you don’t like because otherwise you will die within several days or months might not ever have been a thing for her, yet.
More seriously, I think you’re underestimating her trauma response and how deeply rooted these aversions are. For awhile she wasn’t able to walk across campus alone, even if was “something she had to do to get through the day”. She made sure she always had someone to walk with. Once when everyone else went their separate ways, she hyperventilating in a corner. She’s overcome most of that, basically starting after Ryan was caught (and cut).
The food issues aren’t quite that extreme and she’s tried to push herself a few times, but it’s still a very visceral response, not just the “I don’t think I’ll like it” thing it seems like you’re implying. Like a visceral response to food can easily be as extreme as vomiting if you do force yourself to try it.
She has apparently managed to try sausage on pizza though, during the timeskip.
Well, I asked if she has ever even tried to do any of these hundreds of things that feel bad, and I guess the pizza is one. That’s one step towards taking her pills that may help with her period pains regardless of how hard they are to swallow.
There are things you do because of your immediate, visceral feelings and there are things you do because you have to in order to move towards some goal that your immediate, visceral feelings tell you is important.
Also, while it makes sense that the food aversions and the trouble swallowing pills is related, they might not be.
Why are you being so ableist about this? If these things cause problems for her – and it’s not clear to me that the food aversions, at least, really do – then the solution involves help – not more judgment along the lines of “have you just tried to be normal?”
Since you ask, I’m not judging. I’m asking. Any judgment would depend on what answer this fictional character gives.
Admittedly I have opinions about people who let their neuroses interfere with their basic survival mechanisms, and some of these opinions might be considered unkind. I guess my own neuroses are showing; I’m strongly biased towards survival, when it comes to the question of surviving or being comfortable. As you may guess I have personally had to choose between starving and eating food I didn’t like, so it’s an obvious question to me to think of these things in terms of how badly you want to live.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy for people who like Joyce might be unable to survive because eating their medicine is impossibly uncomfortable. Though it does mean I’m going to try to make it a direct choice between comfort and survival for them if I can.
I hope that explains the why. It’s not that I want Joyce or anyone to feel bad about being sensitive, but I want them to think about the choices they make in terms of life and death. And if I’m biased to life, I’m hoping that being so obvious about it people will easily be able to look past that and decide for themselves.
Trying “to make it a direct choice between comfort and survival for them” seems like it comes dangerously close to putting them at risk of dying if things go wrong.
You should not have suffered childhood trauma over not wanting to eat. Believe me, there are children in that same situation who just go hungry. “Starve them out” is not an appropriate way to treat a child. It is more likely to exacerbate problems than mend them. I’m sure Joyce has had enough of those anusive parenting without adding more.
To be fair those were easy because she didn’t know any better and just took them at face value. It wasn’t until College that she was barraged with hard to swallow pills.
I mean, they’ll help with the cramps regardless of whether you take them at the same time every day for maximum contraceptive protection. But that’s why you don’t take them when you get out of bed, otherwise you can NEVER SLEEP IN (I used to take mine at midday cause I was ALWAYS up and about by then even on the laziest weekend day). Also depending on the specific pills you might have some leeway during which they are still effective.
Joyce, honey, you gotta switch to those massive overnight pads. They’ll encourage the awful habit of not changing once you wake up, because they don’t spill (at least for me with a heavy flow).
I can’t swallow pills, which is why I prefer chewables (the flavoured ones) or the ones that disolve in water. If I need to have a pill it has to be ground up first (there’s a new grinding device for pills now that’s super cool)
When I was a kid I always preferred liquid medicine over pills, but I got used to taking pills as I got older. Now I think I’d rather swallow a pill or two over having to taste a chewable or liquid medicine.
i could never stand liquid medicine; Mostly because the only flavor my parents ever got was that disgusting artificial cherry one.
I could easily swallow a bunch of large pills at once, but Liquid meds would make me puke.
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Joyce, you know how to do this!
also my experience with chewables is they’re disgusting and I’d rather swallow a thing w/o tasting it thx
i would’ve thought the doctor asking ‘probing personal questions’ would tell her details about the pills/what to expect as well
My own experience with university health services doctors would suggest otherwise. That was the only time in my life I’ve ever gotten “I’m the doctor here” from any doctor.
(I had a sinus infection. My sinus infections are amoxicillin-resistant. I asked for doxycycline, and explained why. Cue above line. Three miserable days later I’m back. Fortunately she was at least capable of learning and didn’t pull that stunt again. She was still the worst doctor I’ve ever had, and I was stuck with her for four years, they wouldn’t let me switch.)
…Why didn’t they let you switch??
I have no specific knowledge in this case, but I will say, “never underestimate the petty unhelpfulness of professional bureaucrats.” Sometimes you’ll get one who actually sees it as their responsibility to leverage their knowledge of their organization’s systems and policies in service to the needs of outsiders needing aid, but more often any given functionary is (or chooses to behave as) a nearly-thoughtless drone who does only what they must do to avoid disciplinary action. And sometimes you’ll be confronted with someone who wields whatever measure of administrative power their position holds as a weapon, inflating their own ego by capriciously abusing others through the authority they control. Such active malice (particularly when not motivated by more specific antipathy) is pretty rare – much less common than the genuinely helpful type, and almost invisible when scattered among the great mass of disinterested drones – but it can be pretty remarkable how much misery they can generate without suffering any consequences of their own.
That’s especially egregious at a university where there’s a significantly better than average chance the person you’re treating is studying something relevant, or is in regular contact with someone who is.
It’s really not that hard to personally know a couple of Med students in uni. Or microbiology. Or Pharmacology…
I get kinda nostalgic for the flavor of Flintstones chewables, oddly enough.
The light blue Jelly Belly beans are damn close.
When I take my meds, I first put some water/drinking liquid in my mouth, then push the pill between my lips, then swallow. That way, I never have to taste them.
my go to method to minimize tasting chance is to chuck them into my mouth as hard as I can and tilt my head back at the same time so they hopefully land beyond where I have any taste buds, and then I chug water until I can’t feel them no more
I take a swallow’s worth of water, chuck the pill in, and gulp it before my tongue knows what hit it.
Pills are bitter, but usually not that bad. More tolerable than cough syrup “cherry” and that “citrus” stuff that tasted like vomit. (Artificial grape is at least palatable, even if it’s more “allegedly grape shoe polish” than “Mott’s”.)
I used to do this, and still do for particularly large and/or nasty tasting pills
Most of the time, I find that most pills don’t really taste like anything, or maybe I’ve just gotten used to my regular medication
mood
SAME.
Also, since having to take a painkillar that was bitter as heck, i’ve gotten used to a technique that encases the pill in water in my mouth, preventing it from touching my taste buds, i even do it with non-bitter pills now.
Yeah, I was wondering about that, but Joyce probably has some exception for when Dorothy and Becky are both watching.
My other suggestion was hide the pills in a piece of cheese and rub her neck to get her to swallow
But that’s mixing the pill and the cheese.
Your memory of this comic series is frankly scary.
Indeed.
Ana exists in all times simultaneousy. For her, that strip was today. And so is this one.
I’ll admit I slam Random every day
That’s what I do for pills! For the longest time I tried with water and couldn’t do it. That’s the only way I was told how. Dry swallowing pills changed my life. So easy!
I don’t see what the problem is with taking pills, my bedtime meds total 7 pills, 6 that have to be swallowed whole and one that has to dissolve under my tongue to be effective. I take all 6 pills at once with just a little water no problem. Of course it helps I have been taking multiple pills every day since the truck hit me in 2001, so I’m used to it.
It depends a lot on the person. My mother has been taking a variety of daily meds for years, but still has issues sometimes. (Due to an esophageal web, she has occasional issues with swallowing anything.) OTOH, I rarely have any trouble swallowing pills, even without water. Then again, my total pill intake in the past year was probably about half a dozen ibuprofen.
my birth control actually *helped* me with pills; triquilar is the second-smallest pill I’ve ever had, and has a nice slick coating that lasts long enough for at least two attempts. getting my throat used to accepting a tiny pill every day made it easier to navigate getting the occasional larger pill down. relatively speaking.
also esophagus issues are fucking bullshit! uuuggghhhhhh I want a new esophagus, damnit. instead I’m stuck on pills that are bad for my bones (and don’t have as nice a coating as triquilar).
Destiny’s child?
Sauce?
Destiny’s Child as in the group Beyoncé used to be a part of. I assume (not being all that familiar with them) that this is a reference to their song Bills, Bills, Bills.
“ALL the single dollars?”
“All the single dollars.”
“Bills, bills, bills.”
A veritable russian nesting doll of neuroses
I just realized why the show Russian Doll is called that and I have no clue how I did not immediately figure this out
Don’t fret; you were probably too entranced by Natasha Lyonne’s character to realize the title origin. 🪆
It’s neuroses all the way down.
CURSE YOU AND YOUR COMMENT-STEALING WAYS!
You’re welcome.
not ALL the way down surely? at some point they’ll start being oldroses if you go far enough.
LOL amazing. why can’t i upvote comments on here?
They do move in herds.
The trouble is that replies can become isolated from what they are replying to.
I can’t work out if it’s the neuroses or Russian dolls that move in herds.
Stampeding nested kokeshi dolls for the win!
<3
She’s fractally neurotic. The closer you look, the more you find.
As some point she’s gonna run out of new neurosis and invent more
Dorothy: Joyce, why are you watching What About Bob with a notebook?
Joyce: Research, I worry my routine is getting stale.
Is darkoneko being optimistic or pessimistic?
Yes.
flintstones chewable meds
The first time I was prescribed pills I had to swallow (antibiotics course), I couldn’t do it. I was maybe 10 at the time. I tried several times, then tried chewing it– that was gross. After that, I just pretended to take the pills each day while actually wrapping them in tissue and throwing them out. Luckily, my toe healed without issue, and everyone said I did a good job.
Not a strategy I would recommend, but I’m glad it worked for you.
It is funny because I was the opposite. The doctor had to make an exception and give me pills when I was four, because liquid medication made me retch every time. (My gran’s conviction that Syrup of Fig would fix whatever ailed you was challenged by the fact I would IMMEDIATELY spew it all over the floor.)
I learned to take pills at 4 because I was a brittle asthmatic and HATED the taste of theophylline syrup so much.
Theophylline is a hard core asthma med they don’t use much anymore. It’s so hazardous you need weekly blood work to make sure it’s not poisoning your heart or liver. In the 90s it came in this godawful syrup that somehow had a clingy mouth feel and was simultaneously sweet and so bitter it almost hurt. I hated that stuff so much.
They also used to offer albuterol in syrup form for kids who were severe asthmatics and that also tasted terrible. I was really prone to getting sudden severe attacks where I’d get too tight to breathe enough for a Neb or MDI to work so they’d use the syrup to get some rescue med in while we went to the hospital.
But yeah. Modern medicine is a wonder.
oh wow. My meds are slightly unpleasant/metallic tasting but they aren’t sticky. they’re safe and they work and i basically just need to remember to take them and get my prescriptions refilled.
I didn’t realize that asthma was so difficult to treat so recently. It explains how asthma used to be depicted on television.
I was around the same age, and they were an antibiotic for my fiftieth ear infection or something. I swear those things were the size of M&Ms, or at least bigger than ibuprofen.
When i was a kid I’d get throat infections yearly and had to drink down this god awful thick white liquid antibiotic. It tasted and felt like they put dry pills in a blender with paint. My parents had to do the Mary Poppins thing and shove sugar in my mouth as soon as I took it or I’d be wretching. I was so happy once i got old enough to take pills that it immediately outshone any issues with swallowing them
*plays “I Wanna New Drug” on the hacked Muzak*
PERFECT LOL
* substitute’s Weird Al’s “I Wanna New Duck” when no one is looking *
Here ya go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6uEMOeDZsA
And here too!
https://youtu.be/3KvgQIBcdRk
Kind of wild how Ghostbusters just straight up stole that song, and got away with it.
Since Huey & Co. stole from E.L.O. to make “Do You Believe In Love” I guess it was a deserving victim in Raydio’s case.
Some other band wrote and released the original of Do You Believe in Love. Their name escapes me. It is on Tubetube I imagine.
As a big ELO fan I’m surprised I didn’t notice the similarities at the time.
TIL!
They didn’t exactly get away with it—Huey Lewis sued and Ray Parker quickly settled.
However! The settlement included a confidentiality agreement, and after Huey went on VH1 Behind the Music and said Ray Parker stole his song, Parker sued him for breach of confidentiality and won some money back.
The more you know!
Birth control pills are blessedly tiny. They were actually my first experience in successfully swallowing a pill. For the first 2 weeks they dissolved on my tongue every time before I could manage to get them down, but after a month or two I managed to swallow them most of the time. Ten years later I can swallow all but the biggest pills with no trouble but big ones are still iffy
Yeah. Taking Yaz/Yasmin was just like popping candy. I never could remember to take them at the same time every day, but I’d just put them under my tongue and let them dissolve when I did remember, which was about once a day. (Yeahh… don’t be like me when it comes to taking BC pills, folks.)
LOL same here. Ritalin can’t help ya remember if you don’t remember to take it
I have to take pills at around the same time of day FOUR times a day. Also I take multiple pills at a time . I couldn’t swallow pills at all until my early 20s (I’d throw up every time I tried) and now I can swallow a little handful of them with a sip of water.
You’re a hero!
I never had issues with swallowing pills. When they’re small enough I’m usually to lazy to go and get a glass of water, and I just swallow them dry. Then recently I learned that for some medication the water isn’t just to help you swallow it but mainly to protect your stomach lining… which is also why it says in the instructions “with a glass of water”, not just with a sip…
So yeah, I’ve been doing it wrong all along.
I’m genuinely wondering the same thing, Sarah.
Like, how many neurosis can someone have before their family puts them into a facility to get professional help?
facility? what?
There are facilities for helping people who are unable to avoid being helped.
oh i know what they are. i am just really really turned off by the idea of Joyce being institutionalized, to say the least.
Do you need help adjusting to the idea?
(My inner Mike insists I ask.)
I don’t wanna sour your mood Clif, but this is one thing i don’t wanna joke about
Besides, Mike don’t need to live in your head rent free, i already devised a pixel pocket dimension for him using my alien powers.
Noted.
Who says he doesn’t pay rent? The entertainment value alone …
I agree. Joyce’s parents seem like they don’t believe in psychiatry, but considering how controlling they are, it’d be worse if they did. There’s a lot of enabling psych people out there, and the medications can cause more harm than good, especially if used improperly/prescribed off-label.
Like maybe she could see a therapist, or something, so long as it’s not ABA or ERT since those are both abuse.
The Browns? They just pray for you harder.
I feel this is getting to brattiness levels
As someone who struggled with pills for a very long time, even absolutely necessary ones, I find this perfectly credible.
See my root-level comment below for my personal learnings on this matter.
It’s not brattiness. Some people genuinely have difficulty swallowing pills. Fortunately, I’m not among them, but it’s completely real.
Joyce’s problems that affect Joyce’s body and Joyce’s personal life are not “brattiness”. Even if she were choosing to be like this – and to be clear, she is not – it’s really not okay for you to say that.
Seconded.
Joyce functions well enough in society so she should not be placed in any “facility”.
Insert joke about educational facility here.
Nothing going on in Joyce’s life requires her to be “placed in a facility”, nor would this at all be beneficial to her.
Would not be surprised if her family is more “pray away the problem” then hire a therapist. Besides, Joyce is obedient so therefore doesn’t need help.
Joyce, as a cartoon character, can have as many neuroses as Willis can write for her. I commented once that he didn’t refer to the DSM-5 as he developed his characters but I’m starting to revise that idea.
I sure hope not. The DSM may not list homosexuality as a “mental disorder” anymore, but there’s still a lot of systematic bigotry integrated into that fucking thing.
I indeed look forward to the day autism is no longer considered a “disorder” because of harmless traits contrary to what long standing social institutions tend to value.
That will be a sad and terrifying day because once it’s no longer considered a disorder schools and workplaces will no longer be required to make reasonable accommodations for autistic people.
The Machines win because Morpheus can’t get Joyce to take the red pill.
What she isn’t telling you is that Joyce hasn’t taken a pill in over 30 years. That’s right Joyce is actually a very young looking 48! Why? She never takes pills!
Pills to wake, pills to sleep, pills pills pills for your period pains
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall
Yes, yes, yes! I listened to that vinyl record almost every day after school when I was a kiddo! First song I ever learned to play on the piano. Heavenly.
This comment has caused me to go pull up the song, and it’s probably going to be on repeat for about an hour.
Not complaining, mind you.
Grace Slick originally recorded that song as a member of the Great Society, which was sort of the rough draft for Jefferson Airplane.
Got this reference. It’s not St. Vincent’s best album, but that song (and others) were total earworms.
Joyce is like 15 neuroses in a trench coat.
I can’t relate with this one, sorry, Joyce. I can’t remember when I switched from taking my seizure meds with apple juice in a syringe to just swallowing them and going. I only have a hard time with long or fat pills now.
I can. Gag reflexes are fun!
Same hat!
Not a fun hat.
15 Neuroses in a Trench Coat.doesn’t work as a band name, but it would do just fine as a handle for the next social media environment life forces me to join.
Here’s hoping whatever it is has a high enough character limit.
15neurosesinatre
It would also work as the title for the next DoA book. Now we just have to wait until Willis puts the words into the mouth of one of the characters.
Applesauce is the answer, Joyce. Just pop the pill into a spoonfull of applesauce and you don’t even notice it.
…Joyce eats applesauce, right? It seems like the kind of thing she’d eat.
Nope! It SEEMS like it’s only one food, but it’s actually pulp plus juice, and also you can make out specks of cinnamon.
Peanut-butter, that’s the ticket.
Don’t say peanut butter. It will validate Becky and Dorothy and they don’t deserve this specific win!
Any food can be a homogenous paste if you blender it enough!
As someone who had a broken jaw, I can tell you that a lot of food can indeed be made into a paste.
If applesauce is the answer, you’re probably asking the wrong question.
I feel like you’re probably just being snarky here, but I can’t be sure. This was literally how I learned to take pills, which I struggled with for a long time.
Well, yes. And I’m glad it worked for you Devin. But, while I can see why peanut butter would work, applesauce is liquidy enough that I don’t really understand how it would help.
Applesauce is thick enough to suspend a pill in at least long enough to swallow it. As long as it’s a pill with a coating it doesn’t even really start to dissolve much.
There’s a bit of a spectrum on applesauces, and a slightly thicker one is better, but essentially it works to suspend the payload such that you don’t even notice it going down. And there’s no instinct to chew because it’s so liquidy, even the thicker ones. I’ve also noticed several other commenters have had similar success.
How about yogurt?
Or Jell-O?
I’ve also had success with yogurt, yes! I hate the texture of Jell-O so I’ve never tried that, but if you can get it in and not just sitting on top I see no reason why it wouldn’t work!
Thanks!
I’m now envisioning making the jello with the pills in it. Like individual jello shots with a pill suspended in each.
Yes, there is – just not for everyone.
(“Instinct” is the wrong word here in the first place.)
Not even a spoonful of sugar can help the pill go down.
Is Beyonce, Michelle or Kelly Destiny’s child?
I’d rather drink first so I avoid any bitter tasting pills. Looking at you, acetaminophen.
*plays Pills by St. Vincent on the FitBit*
I used to be the same way. Then I got my medication I had to start taking daily and figured out my system. Now I can dry swallow like House
isn’t dry swallowing technically bad for you?
Depends on what.
Sadly this strip adds some credence to that moment Becky and Dorothy slightly compared Joyce to a dog arguing they’d have to hide birth control pills in her peanut butter. I didn’t like that somewhat insulting take from them. I hope this is an opportunity for Joyce to prove them wrong.
I do appreciate the irony that it’s not for the reason they thought it would be. Or maybe Becky knows about this too. It would make sense that she would.
So, she knew she needed a pad and didn’t have the energy to get one? So that means, er…
Yeah. Been there. Ugh. Just waking up with it everywhere. Awful. And in a top bunk of a shared multibed dorm, too.
Period undies are a GAME changer, for folks who can’t really keep up with pads or rags or tampons or rubber cups … just wash n wear. Wish I’d discovered them sooner!
These are my faves:
https://www.thinx.com/
https://www.thinx.com/speax
They sell products for trans folk, too
https://www.thinx.com/thinx/collections/classic/products/heavy-boyshort?variant=39411795492936
and have a blog for all kinds of health topic discussion.
Just in case there are folks who might not have discovered them yet.
From what I’ve heard period undies aren’t really great for people with heavy flows (such as myself). I can bleed through a combo of a super+ tampon and a pad in less than 2 hours on a bad week, I wouldn’t trust period undies.
Well, your mileage may vary. Sorry to hear about your heavy flows!
I find this particular brand to be just as absorbent as the super heavy flow overnight pads. I’ve always bled profusely & abnormally, and these worked for me, particularly when doubled up with a pad on top. It’s important to keep a change around and a zip-loc bag, just in case. But everyone experiences menstruation differently.
Got an IUD 2 months ago — still bleeding all the time, and got an iron deficiency from it, but the pain and cramping is much better now. I do think it will help in the end, even though getting it is a nightmare. I’m just glad there are so many options these days.
For heavy flow (I have a SERIOUSLY heavy flow) I found that period undies + menstrual cup are a great duo. Just have to give it a few days to get comfy taking the cup in and out (which I have to do every few hours on my first few days) but any leakage is caught by the period undies so it works fine.
Of course Joyce would be using pads rather than tampons – and probably the old-fashioned ones that required the use of a special belt to hold them.
Not loving the judgment baked into “of course she’s using pads not tampons”, there.
Is it actually judgment if it is a purity taboo kind of thing in the fundamentalist culture she was raised in? Which it certainly is in some.
Judgment on that culture, sure.
There are definitely other reasons people use pads instead, but this is a thing.
Yes, it’s still a judgment. I think the purity culture taboos about putting things into your vagina (including for entirely non-sexual purposes) are hot fucking bullshit, and if I was in a conversation with someone insisting that using tampons would make them a slut or take away their virginity (stupid concept anyway!) I’d push back on that, but there are lots and lots of very good reasons why someone might not choose or even be able to use tampons, including psychological discomfort, and that psychological discomfort can stem from other sources besides religious indoctrination/trauma. Shame and mockery are not useful reactions to someone’s psychological aversions about *their own bodies*, no matter where they come from.
No one deserves to be shamed or judged for their comfort level with their genitals. Using tampons over pads isn’t some kind of marker of adulthood that Joyce has failed to achieve, and I find the implication that it is to be icky.
The implication I got wasn’t anything about “marker of adulthood”, but exactly that “Oh right, Joyce was probably raised in that fucking hot bullshit purity culture.”
You might be right. *I* don’t feel that generous about completely unnecessary comments about how anyone handles their period, but I’ll cop to be carrying my own baggage on this one.
I don’t wanna go into great detail on that, but I will say that women shaming women for NOT using tampons is also a thing, and weirdly, men sometimes have thoughts on this that no one in the history of ever asked for or wanted, but they’ll offer them anyway. (They shouldn’t.)
Generally I think beyond outlining the options available and making some nicely factual arguments for and against (menstrual cups: cheapest! Tampons: easiest to handle in public restrooms! Pads: actually I hate pads! But honestly sometimes they’re the most immediately convenient solution!), people should shut the fuck up about how menstruating people are handling their periods and yes even if you don’t think their reasons for picking one option or another are valid. This is a very loaded and emotional topic and that is *not* just my own baggage speaking.
Remember when she found Sarah’s vibrator, or her total ignorance about ‘strap-ons’ and not knowing what size she would wear? I made the assumption of ‘pads, not tampons’ in my post based solely on Joyce’s backstory – and yes, the ‘purity culture’ under which I’m sure she was raised. Anyone trying to read anything further into that is just wasting their time.
I am fully willing to take you at your word on this! No judgment intended. That is cool.
But…please do understand that this is an area where people who have periods often have to deal with a *tremendous* amount of judgment and grossly invasive questioning or insensitive comments about how they manage them. It might be invisible to you, but it is out there, and it’s not abstract to the people who get hit with it. (Not everyone who has a period does. But a LOT of people do.)
Hey, some of us have vaginismus and couldn’t use a tampon if they wanted to.
Plenty of women use pads instead of tampons for a variety of reasons. Tampons are not for everyone and I’m not sure why you’ve got any opinion at all about what other people use to manage their periods.
the first time I needed to take a pill I couldn’t do it so my mom crushed it up and put it in a tablespoon of water for me to drink and it tasted so horrible that I immediately learned how to swallow pills
I’ve been searching “Oravax” and “Oramed” in the news every couple days for the past 2 and a half years — when the oral COVID vaccine comes out, it’s going to be a game changer for the folks with needle phobias. I really hope it comes out soon, and gets appropriately publicized when it does.
The form of delivery of a medication matters.
OK, …new game?
What search terms do you search for, day after day, in your news aggregator of choice?
i don’t really have any.
re: COVID, it seems to me like the end of the Pandemic is ALWAYS three months away :/
“This is the song that never ends.
It just goes on and on my friend!
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was.
And they’ll continue singing it forever just because
this is the song that never ends…”
Machine Learning, Cosmology, ebooks, dark matter, NASA, radical life extension, quantum computing, and the Riemann Hypothesis.
The last one pops up more often than you’d think.
Wow, cool!
There’s probably a way to set up an alert for that word and relevant info when it comes to your area , i had a shot tho luckily it only took a couple seconds and not a huge needle/is preferable than having your blood drawn
Congratulations on your shot!
Yes, Google news alerts are useful too. Just searching obsessively is more fun.
This!!! Though I do have alerts set for some low activity terms.
Not familiar with a “news aggregate”, as such. My regular search terms are much less distressing things, like “FFXIV”, “RWBY”, and “denim shorts”.
Denim shorts, Definitely!
FFXIV… Final Fantasy 14?
You stumped me with RWBY, though.
You haven’t heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, which has a free trial up to level 60 that includes the award-winning expansion Heavensward with no restrictions on play time?
Guess not.
I recall Final Fantasy back around 20+ years ago… a friend played it all weekend, not even stopping to sleep, and barely stopping to eat or use the restroom. Fun times…
Queen Anthai seems to have handled the FF explanation via copypasta, so I’ll only add that I’ve been playing for a little over two years now and it’s been a huge boon to my mental health. If you have a machine that can play it (PS4, equivalent PC), I recommend at least checking it out. If it’s not your style though, I’m not their PR department, so I got no stake in it.
RWBY is a 3D CGI cartoon with a heavy anime influence and a heavy influence from fables and fairy tales, originally created by a fellow named Monty Oum. He unfortunately died after Season 3, but Rooster Teeth (the folks behind Red vs Blue) picked it up and it’s gonna be in Season 9 soon. Its efforts at political commentary are frequently ham-fisted and sometimes outright tone-deaf, but I genuinely enjoy the overall plot and character interactions. Plus everyone is a cool X-Men superhero with weapons that switch between melee and gun modes, so there’s a lot of fight porn that’s okay-ish at worst and stellar most of the time.
And denim shorts are just uh… Very Good.
As far as I know, RWBY (pronounced Ruby) has nothing to do with Final Fantasy.
https://roosterteeth.com/series/rwby
You are correct. They do, however, have a cool crossover with the Justice League.
RWBY has nothing to do with Final Fantasy, but one of its original creators, Monty Oum, got some of his clout by creating a series called Dead Fantasy. It was characters from Dead or Alive beating up characters from Final Fantasy.
I loved Dead Fantasy and am still somewhat bitter it never got finished, partially due to RWBY.
I’d say his sudden and unforseen death had a big hand in that, too. RWBY was kind of his real passion project, from what I can tell, so I can’t fault him. Plus, Square Enix is notoriously shitty about any use of their characters that isn’t directly controlled by their out-of-touch suits, so it’s likely he would have had to stop before much longer anyway.
I used to have a search for bicycle wrecks that was delivered 2 or 3 times a day to my inbox which then went into my blog with commentary on how infrastructure or different rider behavior would have prevented the wreck, until I came to the conclusion that people driving cars and trucks was the problem and the built environment not working unless you were driving a car being a major factor in that. Eventually after 8 years of writing about the carnage I had to quit, because it wasn’t helping anybody except maybe the relatives of the victims.
That’s touching, though. That was very thoughtful of you to do that.
I don’t really do news but when I get the urge to go to pixiv/deviantart i always search to see if there’s new Arlong art cus he’s got a sick design
and that’s when i learned it was very important to give your characters a last name, because if the name is too simple you can get Arlong from One Piece, Ouran from the Final Fantasy with Tidus, Riley from the Lucario Pokemon movie, Ovan from .hack/gu, or other media. And all I want is the dumb shark guy.
i feel like i get info for games and artists off twitter or discord so i dont need to search anymore
Fascinating!
Amazingly, this strip *not* being in flashback-blue suddenly looks weird to me.
Brings back memories of Count Your Sheep.
It took me until halfway through middle school to be able to swallow pills by myself. Until then, my mother would have to place the pill on my tongue and flick it down my throat.
…learning to swallow pills made hanging out with friends so much easier.
How so?
Well, I didn’t have to die of mortification as my friends gathered around to watch my mother pull my tongue out so she can flick advil down! Lolol.
;-D
Ah, those weird little things that you have to rewire your mind to NOT chew. Wish they had a better aftertaste. You’ll get used to it eventually.
Like alot of kids I had trouble swallowing pills. Then my mom gave me what I think an anti biotic I wouldn’t swallow it I instead chewed it and immediately and violently threw up from that point on I had no trouble swallowing medication.
Sounds like metronidazole. That shit tastes like poison and I once let it melt on my tongue (similarly struggling to swallow it) and immediately vomited as well.
BLEG
I was about 6 so it was unlikely metronidazole I think it might have been a either a steroid or anti biotic I can’t remember which I had something was exercerbating my asthma that wasn’t pneumonia
But yeah moral is don’t chew pills that aren’t chewable.
So the “hide pills in peanut butter” thing Becky brought up that one time was actually a good idea?
I now suspect it may have been based in personal knowledge.
a light snack might help but unless the taste is better/you get used to it, i can imagine it backfiring and you end up finding it tedious/liking your fave food a little less
Question from a guy (who has never taken birth control, obviously)… Would a woman actually start taking the pill in the middle of her period? I would have thought it would be something you time to begin after your period ends.
There are the sugar pills that you take so you still have a period but you keep with the habit. But I’ve never started taking the pill during a period so I wouldn’t know.
There are also period medications that you take for your entire cycle (which sometimes helpfully stop or stem menstrual flow) so it could be one of those, too.
A few years ago, as I recall, they started putting out birth control for guys. The guys were huge babies about it and bawled their pathetic fragile tears about how “difficult” it was for them. That’s where my knowledge ends on the subject, because a body can only roll their eyes so far back without risking permanent damage.
I had no idea! The more you know…
https://www.verywellhealth.com/male-birth-control-injections-3970355
I seem to recall a public health experiment in NYC years back, about a particular flavored lube that enhanced sensation and prevented HIV transmission at the same time. I don’t recall whether it was also contraceptive, but it might have been. See, we need more fun-based public health initiatives like that…
there were actually genuinely bad symptoms, that yes, people taking oestrogen/progesterone contraceptives today have because they were approved in the past under shitty conditions like ‘oh women are just complaining i’m sure it’s not that bad’. I got suicidal ideation on the last hormonal contraceptive I tried (AFTER 3-6 months so not just based on the ‘change’ in hormone levels but after my body got used to it). but sure, men are just whining when it happens to them.
I think the problem is less that “men are just whining” but that women are just sort of expected to deal with the exact same if not similar problems with very little research or effort going into anything that could make it better, whereas even the option for men to take that sort of thing on in a women’s stead wasn’t even considered, because the idea of even giving men the option to go through what women are merely expected and are often forced to go through is unthinkable. We’ll just…continue to expect/force women to deal with shitty options until men feel comfortable. Great.
To be fair, birth control medication for men is also a harder problem technically. There isn’t really a natural process to co-opt as there is with woman.
I don’t know enough about the trials in question to know how they compare with women’s birth control, but something like Opus describes seems like not really an attractive option.
Yes, actually, men are just whining when they act like the same shit women get put through just because “that’s how it is” is suddenly a novel problem that someone should really do something about. It’s so unacceptable if a man has a little bit of a mood swing from some medicine, but women have to put up with everything up to and including organ removal just to regulate some body functions, with very few reasonable options that provide any degree of comfort, which are inevitably mocked as women being too delicate? Yes. Male tears boohoo.
On a more personal level, I really am sorry you went through all that, genuinely. Suicidal ideation fucking sucks and I wouldn’t wish it on basically anybody. My rude remarks are for Men Overall, not any specific man, and I do apologise if I made you feel targeted.
I was on the alpha test for that, it didn’t work completely, and it caused ED so it wasn’t so much birth control as sex preventing. This was during the 80s so maybe they have something that reduces sperm count to 0 without causing ED. But yeah that first attempt was a disaster.
i’d think the doctor woudl give more specific instructions but i imagine in most cases it’d be ‘take right away’
Reminds me of when I found my kitten and had to give her antibiotics pills – a fight every day. She HATED me.
Did you know there’s no actual proof for the “you need to take your antibiotics until the end or you’ll be producing resistant bacteria” thing? They proposed it as an idea to be careful about right at the beginning of antibiotics use, and nobody bothered to check it until fairly recently – turns out for most diseases, it doesn’t really matter.
So yeah, I stopped the kitten antibiotics early ><
I thought you were supposed to take the antibiotics to the end just to be sure you actually got everything and they aren’t sitting there, lurking, ready to multiply again and make you go for a second round.
Yes, Sol, it’s the same argument. You “make sure you actually got everything” because, by this argument, the ones you *didn’t* get are the ones which are more resistant to the antibiotic and you really don’t want them to “make you go for a second round” especially since they’ve now multiplied into an otherwise empty field.
Yeah, exactly this. There are some diseases where it’s crucial to kill off all the bacteria because otherwise they’ll come back – I don’t remember the details, I think inner ear infection it was? But usually the immune system gets around to cleaning the leftovers. And for stomach bugs it’s just a game of numbers anyway and you’re probably better off not killing too many good bacteria.
cats seem difficult to deal with if you’re not used to them, would maybe be easier for the vet to have done so or pass it on to another person so they wouldn’t keep their distance from you more, but hope your cat was ok
It depends more on the cat than anything else. I’ve had some where pilling them was easy. Some where you could trick them with pill pockets or just hiding it in their food. And others where it was an epic battle involving blankets, pill syringes and significant blood.
Haha indeed. My kitten was like five weeks when I found her, so even the small pills were large for her. And she’s a FIGHTER. Even the vet was unable to keep her rolled in a towel XD
But yeah, she was fine
And eventually started trusting my hands again.
Anti-biotic resistant tuberculosis says hello.
There may be cases where it’s not true, but it’s certainly not a complete myth
You don’t just start taking birth control pills on a random day
I mean, you CAN…
why would you wait? Just know it takes a week (depending on the specific pill) for them to work as a contraceptive.
because if you dont sync your pill with your first day that first month of your taking the pill will send your cycle out of wack. if you start it for hormone-mood-related purposes you will be even more prone to mood swings
Okayyyyyy, I’m 33 and only JUST have started becoming okay with swallowing TINY pills… in applesauce. Instead of crushing them.
That’s fine. There’s a lot of needless bullying and judgement around people being unable to do things that other people find easy.
For you, taking pills isn’t easy. That doesn’t make you less-than, it just means this thing isn’t easy for you.
For others, something you find easy might be very difficult. Think about how you would treat someone struggling with something you find easy… and then treat yourself that way about pills.
The constant focus on perfect assimilation into one version of “being an adult” is soul-crushing and completely not worth dealing with. Crushing a pill, cutting it up, putting it in applesauce, whatever it takes. All that matters is your health, the rest is just peer pressuring bullshit.
For a while now I have wanted someone to make a parody of that Destiny’s child song to be about chronic illness called “Pills pills pills.”
“Did I take my pills? Did I take my allergy pills? Did I take my afternoon pills? If I forgot than I’ma have the chills….”
Wow, that pun in the hovertext is so clever and well thought out but somehow doesn’t hit because it’s kinda overworked.
And I was thinking basically what Sarah was saying before she said it (about one more neurosis).
Thing is, it’s *not* a neurosis. Even in the most non-technical sense, this is just a simple physical aversion that is best treated as a *physical problem* – not a psychological one.
I’d suggest an occupational therapist or an SLP*, but that’s because of the pill swallowing plus the food aversions. Of course, getting somebody to help you with that as an adult – or even an older but not-yet-adult teen – is *really* not the easiest referral to find.
* SLPs don’t just handle speech and language like you’d expect, they handle all sorts of stuff related to the mouth and throat. Swallowing pills and food aversions are very much part of that.
It is possible to teach somebody how to take pills, though you gotta start small. Some people think “start with tic tacs”, but no, for a lot of people who have trouble swallowing pills tic tacs are already too big. When I insisted my niece learn, we started with *nerds*, and worked our way up to tic tacs, really slowly.
If possible, though, given Joyce’s food aversions and everything else, it’d probably be better for her to work with an occupational therapist than to try to DIY this.
Oh, I cut myself off halfway through.
I meant to also say that Joyce’s brothers having to hold her down to take pills is ABSOLUTELY THE WORST POSSIBLE “solution” to the problem. First, because it doesn’t actually teach her how to handle this on her own, and second, because it adds a layer of trauma to something that many people struggle with.
But the fundiegelical crowd does tend to be bigger on the punishment and brute force approach to parenting than actually teaching their kids.
The trauma is the point. Ruin a person’s brain to the point they can only function under very specific conditions and the rest comes easy.
That makes a lot of sense. Programming.
My older kid can dry swallow pills but the younger one is terrified to try and from my own experience, I’m pretty sure hed vomit if we insisted. I thought about trying tic-tacs but I know they would have been too big for me at first. (I just brute forced my way through a month of birth control pills and eventually managed to swallow some before they dissolved & worked up from there)
Nerds is a great idea, I’m totally going to try that with my younger kid!!
I got the entire list we worked from, start to finish, from a website to help parents of kids with Cystic Fibrosis, of all things. IIRC, their suggested list went something like nerds – sort them from small to large, tictacs, mini m&ms, jelly belly jelly beans which are smaller than most brands, regular m&ms, good and plenty, regular jelly beans, mike and ike. Something like that. They also suggested that some kids who really are averse might be best served starting with *sprinkles*, which dissolve faster than nerds – so the kid thinks they swallowed a candy pill, but really not so much. Still, if it gets them over the initial hump….
And ALWAYS try to begin and end with a win, even if that means going down to a smaller size than you worked on that day.
Thank you so much for the tips! Life will be a lot easier for him in the future if we can help him learn this now!
You are not wrong. Sometime after we worked on pills, which I only did because she was developing the hereditary daily migraine habit and I forsaw a day when OTC pain meds no longer came in liquid format for her, she got some medical diagnoses which now cause her to take a wide variety of pills daily, and not a month goes by when I don’t glance at her pillbox and say “Man, I saved us a whole lot of grief there!”
Sometimes my sister or my niece says it instead of me.
I wonder whether drinking bubble tea with boba tapioca balls might help to practice the experience of washing down solid things with a drink, no chewing.
Ugh, anyone see the movie, “Maria Full of Grace”? That SCENE, where she swallows the grapes whole! Gag! Too much!
i know there’s pills bigger than tic tacs but feels awkward to swallow them when i’m used to biting them down lol but it would be nice if they added flavoring to ‘regular’ pills , i know not everyone’s a fan of cough medicine but the kind i’ve had isn’t too bad
Sarah, she’s like a cat. You’re just gonna have to lay her gently on the ground, throw a pill into the back of her mouth and stroke her throat until she swallows.
Pill pockets are the answer for cats and dogs. It makes them think they are getting a treat.
I’ve had dogs and cats (mostly dogs) who with pill pockets or pills that were wrapped in meat or cheese would chew the entire thing, swallow, then spit just the pill out.
For when those don’t work, they have little pill syringes. Just squirt the pill and some water into the back of her throat. Gets it past the teeth and the water triggers a swallow reflex.
My parents gave me and my sister placebos to practice taking pills when we were very young. mashing medicine in your teeth, messing up the dosage, ew.
I’m picturing Joyce going through what Rachel did in Friends when she had issues putting eye drops in.
luckily i don’t get dry/itchy eyes too often even with allergies but they do seem hard to put in, i always have to just drop it directly on while my eyes are closed and then blink/them seeping in rather than keeping my eye open
I was in college and had a horrible dental infection before I learned to swallow pills. Like I knew how in theory, and people had tried to get me to take them before (I puked immediately,) but nothing short of unrelenting pain could make me do it. And even then I had to lock myself in the bathroom and repeatedly choke myself trying to learn the timing, for like a solid hour. Same for trying contacts, except I never managed that. Too terrified that I’d get it in my eye and then not be able to get it OUT again. So yeah I totally relate to the horror of trying things that make you viscerally uncomfortable that everyone else insists are easy.
i do like chewable gummies but other than texture/added taste idk if it’s that much more effective. at least a smaller pill could be mixed into food/drinks
tho depending on how bad the pain is, a pill should be less effort
Just chew the pills, weakling. The horrible taste will forge your body and your spirit into something stronger.
for real trying to chew them once might convince her to learn to take pills. just awful
“Eat bitter.”
As a child I didn’t think the orange-flavoeed aspirin tasted mediciny enough. I now am at the point where I don’t need water to swallow Muconex. I think there’s a connection.
more “fun” for Joyce
It’s not very good for you, but I find it easier to dry swallow pills. Pop in mouth, swallow. If I add water to the mix sometimes they try to float around my mouth or something
Many pills are less dense than water. Some people find it helps to tip the head down to take pills with water. At any rate, you can drink water before and after taking the pill if that works.
I’m still concerned that we don’t yet have a definitive diagnosis for the source of the pain. Is it endometriosis? Ovarian torsion? Cysts? It’s just the intermittent nature of it — only once every other month — that has me worried that this isn’t just “normal” pain.
Here’s how I would do it if I were the doctor:
Before anything: get a full GYN exam, maybe an ultrasound. Rule out any emergency medical condition. Then, once cause is determined…
Step 1: shot of Toradol. Immediate pain relief.
Step 2: prescription extended-release Motrin or Naproxen (smaller). If she wants to maintain the pain relief after the Toradol wears off, she’ll have to take the pill to keep the prostaglandins at bay. Powerful incentive.
Step 3: start taking the birth control pills (preferably Yaz, because that also has a calming effect) along with the regular pain medicine.
But I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one in a comic strip… :-/
And/or lidocaine patches on the lower back, behind the pelvis, hot water bottle, raspberry leaf and ginger mint tea, lots of dark chocolate, comfort foods, and an excuse from class until she’s feeling better.
Honestly, Joyce could probably use some of the pain medicines that have an anti-anxiety effect, but that’s a little more complicated to prescribe for someone who’s not a regular patient.
Maybe an analgesic cream to rub on the skin, too, to relax the muscles.
OK, here’s a better game:
What’s your favorite remedy for cramps or other pains?
Bag of heated dry oats/rice across the lower belly + partner putting gentle pressure on the part of my back just above my tailbone. Completely kills them as long as I don’t move.
If I have to go somewhere, then it’s just pain relief and buckle-down.
That sounds perfect!
Public health is no good, when they send you home only with a pills prescrition…
Obviously every situation is different, but if taking the pills solves the problem is most cases, then you do that first. For those it doesn’t help, they come back and you try something else.
As long as there are limits on time and resources, I don’t think you can afford to do a complete physical on everyone who comes in. We don’t know exactly what was said at Joyce’s appointment, but if she presented with symptoms that 9 times out of 10 are solved with birth control medication, you give her birth control medication and tell her to come back if it doesn’t help. Subjecting someone who has shown an aversion to going to the doctor in the first place to potentially unnecessary medical procedures just seems needless hassle and potential traumatic.
She definitely needs someone who’ll try to actually diagnose her, but for anyone else: before I got my hysto (combo of gender-affirming care and uterus problem solving), heat pads were something that REALLY helped immensely, that I didn’t discover until after more than a decade of periods, and were what I relied on through the days following my second IUD insertion (this is when I decided to buy one, the doctor gave me one while I was resting immediately after), really painful periods, and uterine prolapse (leading to the hysterectomy), and I still use it for back, ab, and stomach cramps. I got a second one for christmas this year so I could keep one in the bedroom and one in the living room (in case anyone is wondering, I’ve not done any comparisons but mine are sunbeam XLheat king).
tl;dr period havers – try a heat pad if you haven’t.
Pills are easy. Better than slugging down the ‘adult dose’ (1/4 of a bottle) of children’s medicine.
Needles though? Noooope nope nopenopenope
Time to call Jocelyne! Maube she could help make Joyce accept the pills in her life once forever and without have to constantly use violence. I kinda want to see Dina’s reaction to Joyce’s though about pills.
Almost serious question, has Joyce ever tried doing anything even though it felt bad to do it?
(Should have used the word “something” rather than “anything” for clarity, and now it’s going to bother me until this part of the comments section gets eaten by data rot.)
She walked from one building to another alone, despite trauma-induced agoraphobia!
I remember, but, see, that’s something she had to do in order to get through the day. I’m looking for any single solitary time where Joyce “choose” to do something her neuroses tells her not to, even if she could avoid it. Just to try and see if her immediate, visceral feelings might just possibly not be the final arbiter of what is good and correct.
Like, does she ever ask herself, what is the worst thing that could happen if the sausages touch the pepperoni on a pizza?
Like, it tastes wrong? I’ve had that feeling myself. I think tomatoes taste wrong. Chicken a la Jacob definitely tastes wrong, with the bananas and shit. In fact, anything you do to bananas can only make them taste wrong. And don’t get me started on pölsa. But throughout my childhood my mom cooked these things because it was all she could afford, and I understood early on if I didn’t eat my fill of what she served I would just be in pain from hunger until breakfast, so I learned early on to eat what she made even when it tasted wrong and also bad. I wonder if Joyce has ever been mildly hungry, like when you don’t eat for 18 hours or so. She strikes me as having good survival instincts, but they have not been tried (aside from having a gun shoved in her face once). The reality of needing to do things you don’t like because otherwise you will die within several days or months might not ever have been a thing for her, yet.
I think Joyce would like Chicken a la Jacob.
More seriously, I think you’re underestimating her trauma response and how deeply rooted these aversions are. For awhile she wasn’t able to walk across campus alone, even if was “something she had to do to get through the day”. She made sure she always had someone to walk with. Once when everyone else went their separate ways, she hyperventilating in a corner. She’s overcome most of that, basically starting after Ryan was caught (and cut).
The food issues aren’t quite that extreme and she’s tried to push herself a few times, but it’s still a very visceral response, not just the “I don’t think I’ll like it” thing it seems like you’re implying. Like a visceral response to food can easily be as extreme as vomiting if you do force yourself to try it.
She has apparently managed to try sausage on pizza though, during the timeskip.
Well, I asked if she has ever even tried to do any of these hundreds of things that feel bad, and I guess the pizza is one. That’s one step towards taking her pills that may help with her period pains regardless of how hard they are to swallow.
There are things you do because of your immediate, visceral feelings and there are things you do because you have to in order to move towards some goal that your immediate, visceral feelings tell you is important.
What else is there?
Also, while it makes sense that the food aversions and the trouble swallowing pills is related, they might not be.
Why are you being so ableist about this? If these things cause problems for her – and it’s not clear to me that the food aversions, at least, really do – then the solution involves help – not more judgment along the lines of “have you just tried to be normal?”
Since you ask, I’m not judging. I’m asking. Any judgment would depend on what answer this fictional character gives.
Admittedly I have opinions about people who let their neuroses interfere with their basic survival mechanisms, and some of these opinions might be considered unkind. I guess my own neuroses are showing; I’m strongly biased towards survival, when it comes to the question of surviving or being comfortable. As you may guess I have personally had to choose between starving and eating food I didn’t like, so it’s an obvious question to me to think of these things in terms of how badly you want to live.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy for people who like Joyce might be unable to survive because eating their medicine is impossibly uncomfortable. Though it does mean I’m going to try to make it a direct choice between comfort and survival for them if I can.
I hope that explains the why. It’s not that I want Joyce or anyone to feel bad about being sensitive, but I want them to think about the choices they make in terms of life and death. And if I’m biased to life, I’m hoping that being so obvious about it people will easily be able to look past that and decide for themselves.
Trying “to make it a direct choice between comfort and survival for them” seems like it comes dangerously close to putting them at risk of dying if things go wrong.
Amelie, if you’re not judgmental then you should really try harder not to sound like you’re judging people.
Putting people at risk of dying – a “direct choice between comfort and survival” is better framed the way I just did – is pointless and immoral.
Also, again: it’s not a neurosis.
You should not have suffered childhood trauma over not wanting to eat. Believe me, there are children in that same situation who just go hungry. “Starve them out” is not an appropriate way to treat a child. It is more likely to exacerbate problems than mend them. I’m sure Joyce has had enough of those anusive parenting without adding more.
SHE MIGHT THROW UP
People with severe food aversions can get vomit from them. This is not a neurosis, and even if it was, “just power through” is not the answer.
She got meatballs with her buttered noodles on her “date” with Jacob after visiting his church.
funny considering all the metaphorical hard to swallow pills she had to ingest growing up in a very religious family
To be fair those were easy because she didn’t know any better and just took them at face value. It wasn’t until College that she was barraged with hard to swallow pills.
People always look at me weird when I swallow pills without water.
I hope she’s been taking liquid Motrin or something all this time.
I mean, they’ll help with the cramps regardless of whether you take them at the same time every day for maximum contraceptive protection. But that’s why you don’t take them when you get out of bed, otherwise you can NEVER SLEEP IN (I used to take mine at midday cause I was ALWAYS up and about by then even on the laziest weekend day). Also depending on the specific pills you might have some leeway during which they are still effective.
Joyce, honey, you gotta switch to those massive overnight pads. They’ll encourage the awful habit of not changing once you wake up, because they don’t spill (at least for me with a heavy flow).
Every new fact we learn about Joyce just makes me feel personally targeted
You’re valid.
Ugh, I much prefer standard pills to chewable ones. I cannot stand the texture of the vast majority of chewable pills.
I can’t swallow pills, which is why I prefer chewables (the flavoured ones) or the ones that disolve in water. If I need to have a pill it has to be ground up first (there’s a new grinding device for pills now that’s super cool)
When I was a kid I always preferred liquid medicine over pills, but I got used to taking pills as I got older. Now I think I’d rather swallow a pill or two over having to taste a chewable or liquid medicine.
i could never stand liquid medicine; Mostly because the only flavor my parents ever got was that disgusting artificial cherry one.
I could easily swallow a bunch of large pills at once, but Liquid meds would make me puke.
“That’s my secret, Sarah…”
Yeah, one more trauma. The family thing, parents or siblings, having to hold you to do something uncomfortable to you is real…