Swallowing drugs

Swallowing Drugs

Swallowing tablets with no water in sight. That title was an attention-grabbing “summary” 🙂

So today, I more or less woke up with a headache. It hadn’t improved several hours later when I took my seat on-board the SAA flight from Johannesburg to Lagos. I fished around in my laptop bag and found a little hospital-dispensed sachet of paracetamol caplets (or whatever tablets with the oblong shape are called). I looked towards the front of the plane and realized it would still take a while before the plane was ready for takeoff and I wasn’t likely to be able to get anything from the hostesses before then as lots of people were still filing in, putting their bags in the overhead compartments and taking their seats.

There I was seated with some gremlins playing heavy-metal music in my head.

I decided I should try and swallow the 2 caplets without water. I have done similar things before in the past but not frequently – usually with regular round tablets.

It’s not as bad as one would think but it is advisable to indeed have water at hand (then why bother you ask) in case something goes wrong.

I had read somewhere that the taste cells in the tongue is mostly at the tip and possible some along the outer edge (which I think I have more or less confirmed) and one could reduce the bitter taste of almost anything by avoiding contact with those regions of the tongue? So the main trick is to drop the tablet a little back on your tongue (not that paracetamol tablets are really bitter though). The next step is to make some extra saliva to swallow the caplet. This is a little difficult to explain but it should be natural to most people (after all people salivate easily without conscious thought at the sight or thought of some delicacy they fancy – but i understand that in the case of the tablet, nervousness may actually have the opposite effect). You just “work” your tongue/throat as if you want to swallow a few times. Once you have a little build-up, you then attempt to swallow the caplet. It may not go smoothly and you may need to “work” your throat again to “float” the tablet a little. Sometimes it feels as if the caplet/tablet would (or is going) down the “wrong” way, but you should be alright. Depending on the shape of the tablet, it could actually be quite uncomfortable going down (trust me, I have experienced this first hand).

Anyways, I “did” both tablets one after the other. And due to psychology of it, I started feeling a little better almost immediately even though I knew that the tablets have probably not even started to dissolve not to talk of the active components making their way to my head to relieve me of the headache.

The flight was OK except that the entertainment system refused to work for most of the flight.

Well, I did manage to watch Johnny Depp’s “The lone ranger (2013)” towards the end of the flight. But all in all, a reasonably comfortable flight on SAA. No one ever died from missing 6 hours of entertainment on-board a plane so what is there to complain about?

Have a lovely week!