When You Say Meds You Mean Vitamins, Right?

Talk was like the vitamins of our friendship: Large daily doses kept it healthy.

— E. L. Konigsburg

This post was inspired by a recent video call with Fran. As we were talking I noticed the vitamin tablets I’d set out on my desk earlier in the day. I decided to take them there and then rather than wait until later and very likely forget.

“I’m just taking my meds,” I said, swilling them down with mouthfuls of room temperature coffee.

Fran waited until I’d finished then asked, “When you say meds you mean vitamins, right?”

I figured she just wanted to check I hadn’t contracted some prescribable health condition without telling her. “Yes,” I confirmed with a smile. Her reply caught me off guard.

“You call them meds because you want to be part of the club.”

I stopped myself laughing just in time. It was neither a joke nor a question. There was no need for Fran to elaborate which club she meant. Our book High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder is dedicated to “the ill ones and the well ones.”

Well or ill, we are all people. Nevertheless, it is naive, disrespectful, and dangerous to downplay the impact illness has on those affected by it. Those who are ill are often treated differently — and poorly — compared to those that society considers able-bodied and (especially) able-minded. In consequence, they have particular life experiences, perceptions, expectations, and needs. To use Fran’s terminology, she is the ill one in our relationship; I am the well one. Nothing more or less is implied by our use of these terms.

My well one label is still valid. Earlier this year in A Few Thoughts On Turning Sixty-Four I summarised my health status. “I’ve never been what anyone would call fit,” I wrote, “and I carry more weight these days than I’m happy with, but I have no specific health issues and I’m not on any medication.” Since writing that I’ve shed thirty pounds in weight, so if anything I’m doing better than I was.

All that being true, why would I want to label myself an ill one? On a conscious level I don’t, but there’s an element of truth in Fran’s assertion that I harbour a desire to be “part of the club.” Most of my friends and family are card-carrying members. I don’t want to be ill but there are times when I feel very much on the outside looking in, unable to share or understand what life is like for some of the most important people in my life. This isn’t a new thing. The following excerpt from my 2021 article Belonging (Longing to Be) describes my sense of exclusion from spaces quite rightly reserved for others.

Around this time [2017] I began volunteering with Time to Change and other mental health groups and organisations, including Newcastle’s Recovery College (ReCoCo). I’ve written elsewhere how excited I was to join the ReCoCo family, and how that fell apart when I realised I never should have been there. Once again, I was on the outside looking in, this time from the other side of a line separating those with lived experience of mental ill health and those without. It hurt deeply, although I understood. Services need to be developed and delivered with, and where possible by, people with appropriate lived experience.

The past year has brought insight and a sense of acceptance. The following passage is taken from An Instrument for Living: How Am I Using My Words?, written in response to The Outsider by Colin Wilson.

I now view my lack of belonging as less a personal fault or failing and more a simple statement of fact. There are circles, collections, groupings of people — and there is me, out on the periphery, looking in from the outside. [These deliberations have] also helped me to recognise that the role of the Outsider is well-established, if not always envied or lauded.

There’s an irony at work here. The Outsiders Club boasts a singularly paradoxical membership, comprised as it is of those who don’t belong anywhere. I’m reminded of Russell’s paradox, named for British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell. His proposition of “the set of all sets which do not contain themselves” broke set theory and with it German philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege’s quest for a comprehensive logical basis for mathematics. For more on Russell’s paradox check out this video by Australian physicist Jade Tan-Holmes or this one by philosophy professor Jeffrey Kaplan. Less erudite is Groucho Marx’s famous letter of resignation from the Friars’ Club in which he’s supposed to have confessed, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

Twenty-five years ago I was a valid if temporary member of the ill ones club. I was hospitalised for ten days with severe abdominal pain and bleeding after which I was on anti-inflammatory medication for two years. The suggested diagnosis of Crohn’s disease was never confirmed. It’s interesting that for those two years I took my medication as and when prescribed, two tablets three times a day. I’m much less consistent with my vitamins. For the record, the tablets I took on my call with Fran were Multivitamins and Iron, High Strength Vitamin B, and High Strength Vitamin D. I occasionally take effervescent Vitamin C and even more occasionally a vegan omega-3 supplement. I take them supplement my vegetarian diet.

I’m grateful to Fran for picking me up on my funny-not-funny appropriation of the meds label. She reminded me that it’s inappropriate to claim membership of any club or group without the relevant credentials. Things change, especially as we age. There may come a day when I’m legitimately reaching for my meds but as Aragorn might have declaimed before the Black Gate, “It is not this day. This day we take our vitamins!”

 

Photo by Martin Baker.