For the first three years of my life, I had to have a parent or guardian open up each of the six capsules I needed and pour the contents onto a few spoonfuls of jelly. This got old, both because accidentally biting one of the time-release spheres would introduce my tongue to pure digestive enzyme excitement and because putting fried chicken in front of a hungry child and telling him he can't eat it yet is banned by the Geneva Conventions.
So at the tender age of 3, I learned how to open childproof pill bottles. Now I can do it one-handed, in about 3 percent of the time it takes a drunken person to comprehend that they have to squeeze and twist. I also had to count out six pills and swallow them whole, which scared my parents because these pills are precisely "way too friggin' big" for a little kid. I allayed their fears by showing them I could swallow Jolly Ranchers with one gulp.
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And I would've done the same thing with that jawbreaker, too, if they'd let me.
These pills are not perfect, leading to what my doctors refer to as "bulky, fatty stools." In layman's terms, that means massive fucking shits. I spent a good portion of my childhood thinking that my stomach must contain a portal to the Negative Zone, because there's no way that all that poop was stored in my body, let alone this dimension. On the plus side, it gave me the impetus to become a decent amateur plumber by the age of 7. Destroying a toilet three out of the five times I used it throughout the day made me really good at fixing my mistakes.
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