Albert's Pharmacy

I try to take as few pills as possible. All medicine has some kind of side effect that comes with it. So I've found that the fewer one can take the better.

But there are pills I can't avoid, and at times they are different. Over the course of three-years I've collected quite a few. I think I may have taken almost every one available on the market. Or at least I must be close.

Of course many of these pills are stopped at some point, sometimes being traded for another. Sometimes I'll end up revisiting a pill that I had taken previously. It's a whirlwind of pharmaceuticals.

In college I lived with a graduate film student from South Korea - Mr. Kim. He was amazed by our medicine in America. We had a pill for this and a pill for that. I just assumed that was the way it was in South Korea. But it wasn't even close.

He explained to me that they had many natural remedies that have been studied over thousands of years. One of the remedies was to drown a snake in a bottle of water and then drink the combination of water, dead snake stuff, and snake urine. He said the snake urine was really what worked to fix health defects.

The strongest medicine of all, Mr. Kim told me, was bear's liver.

I guess it's all the same thing. We just extract the active ingredients and process it into convenient pills.

Frankly I'm much happier taking a pill than digging into a bear's liver.

I have a kitchen drawer and shoe box filled with drugs. Drugs that I do not currently use. The ones I use now are hidden on a shelf in the kitchen that only I can reach.

Why don't I just throw them away? I don't know. They are expensive. And I have had to go back to some of them.

Right now I take at least nine pills a day. Because of my painful shoulder I may need to add as many as seven more to that total depending on how much pain I'm experiencing.

The doc did order an x-ray of my shoulder. I'm going to have that taken care of tomorrow when I have to have bloodwork done as well.

I hope the x-ray reveals something. I mean there's no question that something is going on. Sometimes not knowing what that something is the worst thing of all.