by Pamela Jacobs
A medication I’m prescribed requires being taken on an empty stomach—a tricky proposition for an all-day eater. Me and an empty stomach really aren’t a thing.
It’s a forever medication for hypothyroidism. The thyroid gland, a winged, Wu-Tang-looking tissue formation in the front of the neck, weighing less than an ounce, has a single essential purpose: converting iodine from food into the hormones T3 and T4. Once in the bloodstream, T3 and T4 control the body’s metabolic rate, muscle and digestive function, bone maintenance, and brain health. All thirty trillion cells in the body rely on these thyroid hormones.
An underactive thyroid is relatively easy to regulate. With access to one medication serving synthetic T3 and T4, the patient is pretty much okay. Still, it takes a bit of vigilance to pull off a daily pill in perpetuum. Lapsing on medication or avoiding it altogether, especially for Antiestablishmentarians, is easy. Additionally, tasks or hobbies requiring unwavering discipline, like the rigor of competitive sport or being a concert musician, are not my bag. Hence, doing this one thing faithfully is astounding.
The only option for an empty stomach is about an hour before morning coffee. My plastic pedestal alarm clock of yore upheld a pink hippopotamus standing on one leg. Her second hind stump extended sideways, hyperbolic eyelashes painted on as to appear extra adorable. While the alarm sounded, a sing-songy voice recording counted off a metallic reveille. A red hula hoop creakily made an ellipse around the performing animal’s belly until hitting a gumball-shaped button beside the hippo’s foot which shut it up with a final, jolly, “Good morning!” More like “Gooh mohneeng!” For years, before smartphones, it worked.
Over my right shoulder on the bedside table, a stash of petite robin’s-egg-blue pills, circular or oblong depending on their manufacturer, lives in a diamond-shaped porcelain dish stamped Fermanagh Ireland, itself a pale opalescent yellow. Each night one pill is placed at the table’s edge beside a drinking glass two-thirds full of water. Objective being, when the alarm goes off, hand finds pill, semi-conscious or less in slumber.
Most mornings are alike. Alarm: waves. Response: automatic.
Oblique, lat, and tricep do the work of raising up and pivoting my upper torso towards the illuminated device. Three dexterous maneuvers of arm and hand are carried out with robotic precision. First, ending, instead of snoozing, the alarm. Second, hitting the seven-millimeter baby-blue target, fingertips to table to tongue. Drinking glass up, drinking glass down. Then, hopefully, briskly back to sleep for that precious remaining hour of five to six.
Occasionally, through slit eyes, I witness an arm rainbowing from beneath the down blanket towards the pill like a psychedelic flashback. Occasionally it happens with no vision or memory whatsoever—only the pill is gone. It also happens, when the night’s sleep has been crappy, alarm time creeps up, or conversely, I creep towards it. Everybody knows this feeling. ‘Round about twilight, the dark purple hour.
Wafting through sleep, interrupted or not, an invisible on-off switch inside of me flips, setting the cell-saving pantomime in motion. 7,300 odd times and counting. Part badge, part alter-reality. In this respect, the ritual feels suiting. The requirement is straightforward. It’s the mythic quality of the story I tell myself that keeps it interesting.
Pamela Jacobs is the antiheroine, a lá Kill Bill’s Beatrix Kiddo, the Bride, who, surviving assasination, reclaims her body from dead, and in a phantasmagoric display of vitality, slays the perpetrators of harm against her. That’s me, Pam Jacobs, metaphorically speaking, played by Uma Thurman in a Tarrantian dreamscape, without the grindhouse gore.