Mr. Yuck is Miss Nice

Those people at poison control are quite friendly. You know how I know? Oh because I almost caused Shakey to OD on painkillers this weekend.

Can you say GUILT?!

Yeah, so neither of us are big pain reliever imbibers and therefore most of the bottles of Tylenol in our house are expired. Shakey thinks you can still use them, but I tend to disagree--it's one of our ongoing "discussions." Anyway as I bitched about described in a recent post already Shakey is currently suffering from Hand, Foot, Mouth which is causing him to experience tremendously painful (like giving birth I'm sure) sores in his mouth and he's required some relief (really, I do feel bad for him).

When we ran out of the only unexpired bottle of Tylenol over the weekend I turned up a bottle of CVS brand "Pain Relief" tablets in the bottom of some bag. Lo and behold they were still good so I looked at the milligrams per tablet, saw that they were 220 each and thought that was a bit odd but shook out three and handed them to him every six hours like they do at the hospital. And Shakey slept...for two days.

I thought he might be taking the whole being sick thing a little far, but who was I to complain since he'd just a super-trooper through my strep (did I just use the term super-trooper?). Well this morning he woke up! And for some reason he read the fine print--okay directions--on the little pain relief tablet bottle and guess what! It wasn't ibuprofen. It was naproxen...and you're only supposed to take one tablet every 12 hours and no more than three in a 24 hour period.

He was feeling much better this morning so we went about our day, though it crossed my mind a time or two to see if Hallmark makes a "Sorry I almost offed you honey" card. Midday, however, he started experiencing a number of the overdose symptoms listed on the web, so I called our family nurse (my sister-in-law) for advice. Not wanting to appear to relieve me of any guilt should the case go to trial, she directed me to poison control--or so that's what they do in the ER she said. And that's how I ended up on the phone with the lovely Tina at poison control this evening.

Tina was so reassuring, let me know that naproxen was probably the safest pain reliever to overdose and told me that Shakey's symptoms shouldn't cause us any alarm. She even asked for our name and number so she could call us back tomorrow to check in on us. Shakey piped up that she was just adding me to their spousal abuse registry--she laughed and said yeah she was. A sense of humor and the willingness to relieve me of the guilt of nearlly accidently poisoning my husband. What a woman!!

So next time you fail at offing your husband try to make your honey feel better in his time of need, remember you can over do it...but poison control is there--and they're so nice--though apparently they're not using Mr. Yuck anymore.