Author: Gil

Those of you who pretend to know me through this blog pretend to know that I’m a creature of habit. When something works out for me, I stick with it till it fails. Then I kick it to the curb. When I break from this practice, I tend to get screwed.

Last week week, for example, I switched from Breathe Right brand nose strips over to the private label brand at CVS. I should’ve known something was wrong when one of the instructions was “line up the bump” and another was “hold in place for 20 seconds.”

By morning, the strip was half off one side of my nose, and removing it left a nasty mark on the bridge (where I lined up the bump). So it’s back to the same old.

Now, if you’ve made it through this far, then you know there’s gonna be some sorta payoff. In this instance, it involves fluorescent urine and potential liver and CNS damage.

See, the same day I bought the cheap-ass nose strips, I also needed to restock on my multivitamin. I had just finished a 200-count bottle of One-A-Day Men’s Health. It’s only in the past year or two that I got into the habit of taking vitamins. I can’t detect any effect, but it’s possible I’d be a deteriorated wreck by now if I hadn’t been taking the darn things.

Amy & I checked out the local health food store, since she’d never been inside. I took a look at the vitamins while she was checking out some rice. The clerk directed me to Ultra II dailies from Nature’s Plus. It cost $25 for 60 tablets, which took me aback. But I bought them, figuring “at that price, they must be good.”

That was Saturday. Wednesday evening, Amy asked how the new vitamins were. Besides expensive.

I said, “They seem fine. I gotta say, though, I had no idea my body could produce a yellow that fluorescent.” She chalked it up to the B-complex in the vitamins. I thought maybe it was polonium-210, and that the FSB was ready to silence Virtual Memories for good, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Unless she was in on it. . .

Okay, so maybe I was getting a little paranoid.

I figured that having fluorescent urine would make for a fine party gimmick, since we do have that Super Bowl bash next Sunday, but Amy decided to give my new vitamins an extra look.

After a few minutes on the laptop, and she announced, “You need to stop taking those.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, it says here that the upper daily limit of vitamin A is 10,000 IU. And your new vitamin has 25,000 IU.”

“. . . Wow! There’s a Teratology Society? Is that like the Monster Society of Evil?”

“Sigh.”

I think I’d be worried if Amy did get some of my references.

We checked out a few more reputable sources, plus wikipedia, and determined that it was probably best if I don’t risk liver collapse, osteoporosis, CNS damage and, most important, hair loss (gotta have your priorities straight). So it’s back to the same old.

(Just wondering: if they’re pseudotumors, that means they’re not as bad as regular tumors, right?)