Optimist vs overpriced urine
Cautious hope and an incalculable cost-per-piss.
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Every Sunday, I line up the bottles on my kitchen table, preparing for maximum concentration.
Two of the clear ones…
One tiny round pill…
Four chunky capsules, twice a day…
I check each dose and decant the pills into flower-shaped organisers from Amazon. Pink for the morning, blue for the evening. If I don’t make time for this laborious task, there’s not a chance in Hell I’ll succeed during the week.
There are so many bottles, you see.
Prescribed vitamins for correcting deficiencies. Supplements that were suggested in a book with a baby on the front cover. Chinese herbs that my always cheerful acupuncturist insists upon, herself tracking the undulating doses over the course of many months.
Seeing them grouped together is intimidating. They are soldiers standing in formation, preparing for battle. Regimented. Glossy. Cautiously optimistic. Sometimes, I enjoy a glass of sparkling water while I attend to the task. Sometimes, a large glass of red wine. And why not? There’s nothing yet in my belly to safeguard.
“That’s a lot of tablets,” my husband says as he watches my well-choreographed routine of organisation.
“Yes,” I say. “I might not be pregnant, but I’ve got very expensive urine.”
It’s true: these pills are costing a bloody fortune. When I began taking them last year, I told myself it wouldn’t be for long. I also thought that one pill organiser would be sufficient. But as my attempts to Tetris together the capsules into their compartments became more and more ridiculous, I eventually had to admit defeat. Oh well, just another $10 for Jeff Bezos and his ballooning pockets.
On the loo, I try to calculate the cost of a piss.
It’s impossible: the maths is too hard, the variables too many. On the days when I succeed with an unrelated habit—drinking all the water from my ridiculous half-gallon bottle—I visit the toilet more frequently, and therefore, my cost-per-piss goes down. When I’m less successful with hydrating myself, my cost-per-piss skyrockets. And then there are days when I forget to take any at all.
But when I do remember—both morning and evening—I open the lid of my allotted day and tip the tablets into a ramekin. Then, two at a time, I swallow the pills. It is a slow kind of deployment.
Make haste, I silently will the troops. We are running out of time.
Do not mistake my impatience for despair. I don’t feel sad. My new tablets are a far cry from the old ones: targeted cancer therapies, estrogen blockers and anti-depressants. Taking those pills was confirmation: I was sick and broken. With each dose came a quiet reminder. You might not survive this.
But these tablets—these expensive, absurd little things—are acts of optimism.
Each one is a tiny promise to myself: You have a future. You’re chasing a dream. Just let yourself hope, two tablets at a time.
It’s the smell of my five-year-old grand-daughter’s hair - I don’t see her all that often because she lives abroad. But every time I do I am overwhelmed with joy and gratitude that I’ve lived long enough to see her begin to grow up.
The sound of one hand clapping or of a tree falling alone in the forest ... and now the cost of a piss. The list of Big Questions grows. Emma, thanks for your contribution to the mysteries, to storytelling and to this suddenly brightened day of mine.