Oh, the horror of swallowing rectangular tablets!

In one last moment of courage, you would crush the tablet into smaller pieces and swallow with a lot of water, but the bitter after taste would linger inside your mouth for the remainder of the day. ILLUSTRATION| IGAH

What you need to know:

  • I could have allowed him to go and change on his own, but inwardly I have this morbid fear that there is a boy child molester lurking in the changing rooms waiting to do harm to the defenceless boy child.
  • In the course of changing, I noted that there was a slight patch of scruffiness on his scalp, and from my rudimentary medical skills that every parent is entitled to, I concluded that he could have picked some rash infection from some place, most likely from school or from his barber.
  • Do you have feedback on this story? E-mail: [email protected]

I recently took my son Brian for his maiden swimming class in a nearby members club belonging to a local bank.

It’s a fatherhood duty I have always looked forward to, and the fact that he has come of age and ready to venture into a swimming pool without drinking half the pool dry or attending to his long call inside the pool gives me immense joy.

I cringe at the scene that the club management would cause if the swimming pool attendant went them with a request to empty and refill the pool because the son of a man has decided to desecrate the pool water with the remains of his last night’s meal.

I was quick to note that most of the boys were accompanied to the pool by their mothers, but I will leave it there because I don’t want to get started on the extent to which the father figure has abdicated the fatherhood duty of which this should form part.

You always encounter this mother in the male changing rooms tying to take her son through the changing process and to me they always look out of place, yet the mother can’t take the boy to the girls changing room because he is old enough to make the girls feel uneasy by his sheer presence therein.

REFRESHER CLASSES

There is always the first time, and changing Brian before he entered the pool and later accompanying him to the showers and changing rooms are skill areas where I was left feeling like I required some refresher classes.

I could have allowed him to go and change on his own, but inwardly I have this morbid fear that there is a boy child molester lurking in the changing rooms waiting to do harm to the defenceless boy child.

In the course of changing, I noted that there was a slight patch of scruffiness on his scalp, and from my rudimentary medical skills that every parent is entitled to, I concluded that he could have picked some rash infection from some place, most likely from school or from his barber. 

It reminded me of my days in Karugo Group of Schools back in my village where skin diseases ravaged us to the extent where at one time the whole school was closed for a whole day and all of us were directed to go and get attended to at the local health centre.

Although skin infections in various forms were a common sight, this time it was a serious infection – no one seemed to know its name and even up to this day I have not managed to Google the name of the infection, but we just called it “shillings” because it manifested in the form of large circular patches of parched skin on the scalp that resembled a series of one shilling coins arranged meticulously on the scalp.

The infection was so severe that nearly all kids showed clinical signs in one form or another, and for those who had not yet shown the symptoms, it was very clear that it was just a matter of time.

The infection ate into our hair and left dry scalps, and during school assembly, you could have been forgiven for believing that this was a group of upcoming monks who had just undergone clean head shaving in preparation to join a monastery.

On this particular Friday some officials whom I suspect comprised of education and health officials visited the school, and after a lengthy indoor meeting with the headmaster, an urgent school assembly was called where we were advised to seek medical attention at the local health centre. Luckily in those days, public health facilities worked perfectly.

LUCKY BOY

The nurses seemed to have been waiting for us and as if on cue, we were herded in one at a time into the treatment room where we each faced the dose that awaited us.

Brian is lucky, or maybe unlucky, that he did not get to meet the nurses of old.

Unlike today where the nurses in the hospitals where he is attended to are all smiling angels wearing flowery clothes and serenading him with nursery rhymes as they usher him into serene looking doctors rooms full of toys and favourite cartoon characters drawn on the wall, the hospitals of old resembled interrogation and torture chambers.

There was nothing like baby friendly jabs or sweetened syrups and tablets. Injection needles resembled nuclear warheads both in size and in terms of the pain that they inflicted on your backside.

The syrups were thick and most of the times they were either crimson red or deep maroon in colour, and the taste was equivalent to bitter leaf soup to which had been added battery acid and Datura stramonium extract.

The tablets came as big as building stones – there was a particular one that I always received every time I visited the health centre, I can’t exactly remember for which illness.

It was white in colour but coated with a thin pinkish coat that was a bit sugary to make it more palatable.

The trick was to swallow the tablet as quickly as possible before the pink coating got dissolved in your saliva, because inside the coating was the white content that seemed to have been laced with a biological weaponry agent.

Because my throat was still narrow unlike nowadays where it has been widened by the act of swallowing large pieces of roast meat and big chunks of ugali, swallowing the tablet was always an uphill and dreaded task.

The tablets were rectangular in shape complete with sharp corners, clearly in sharp contrast to the cylindrical shape of the human gullet, and swallowing one was always a harrowing exercise.

STANDBY GLASS OF WATER

You were supposed to keep a glass of water on standby, then arch your head backwards while opening your mouth wide.

With one flawless motion, you were supposed to throw the tablet into the inner recesses of your mouth next to the air – food highway intersection and quickly chase the tablet with a mighty gulp of water and then wash it downstream with more water until the glass was empty.

This was the easy theoretical part and it never worked in practice.

After throwing the coated tablet down towards your gut, the sheer size of the tablet coupled by the obvious phobia for the kind of bitterness camouflaged in the coating would trigger a reflex action that shut your gullet.

UNEQUALLED HORROR

In one moment of horror unequalled anywhere in the horror movies, the tablet would find itself dancing on your tongue where the coating would swiftly dissolve, leaving a taste in your mouth that made the rest of your body cringe and contort in undescribed unpleasantness.

In one last moment of courage, you would crush the tablet into smaller pieces and swallow with a lot of water, but the bitter after taste would linger inside your mouth for the remainder of the day.

Back to Brian’s story, I presented him to his favourite nurse who soothingly applied an anti-fungal ointment on his scalp and him on his way to regaining his usual skin tone.

Lucky young man may never know the pain of swallowing a big, rectangular tablet.

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