 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Rhodry's PillsJanuary 30, 2008 Rhodry's treatment consists of a painkiller to make him comfortable and a mostly low-tech strategy to ease, uh, "elimination." The current painkiller of choice is Previcox, "for the control of pain and inflammation associated with osteoarthritis in dogs," which is working very well. The lameness in Rhodry's left hind leg is barely noticeable, and he's having an easier time getting up. To keep the poop coming -- OK, so why do all the nontechnical terms for "what comes out the other end" sound like either euphemisms or expletives? "Feces" just doesn't sound colloquial enough for informal prose -- he's getting Metamucil. Yesterday I went down to Leslie's to get some docusate sodium, recommended by Rhodry's vet as a "hydroscopic." I think that's the word; it pulls available water into the feces/poop and makes it easier to pass. Well. I had no idea how many over-the-counter products were out there to achieve what the TV commercials of my childhood called "regularity." (I was well beyond childhood before I understood that "regularity" had a specific, unmentioned meaning. It was one of those coming-of-age things, like finally understanding that a "sanitary napkin" was not something you'd take to the dinner table. The trick was figuring it out on your own before you became a laughingstock for revealing your ignorance in public.) There are probably many more out there -- Google wanted to tell me about all of them when I searched for "docusate sodium" -- but Leslie's is a small pharmacy on a high-rent street in a small town, so its stock is limited. The next thing I noticed was that the name brand, Colace, cost more than three times as much as the generic. The generic name is "stool softener." So there is an alternative to "feces" and "poop," not to mention "dung" and "shit" -- doesn't "shit softener" have a nice ring to it, though? I bought a 100-softgel bottle of the generic. Just think: before I started giving Rhodry flax oil last year, I didn't even know what a "softgel" was. Rhodry was also out of his glucosamine + chondroitin "caplets" -- another term I learned when I bought my first bottle of (generic) glucosamine almost three years ago. So -- was there any point in buying more? Glucosamine, says the bottle, "promotes long-term joint health." Rhodry's long term is considerably shorter than I thought it was a month ago. Would his joints start deteriorating as soon as glucosamine was dropped from his diet? More to the point, was it doing any good anyway, or was this just another boondoggle foisted off on gullible consumers by Big Pharma? Continuing the glucosamine, I decided, was a vote for Rhodry's well-being for however much time he'd got coming. Usually I buy a two-month supply for about $28. This time I bought a one-month supply for a little over $15.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||