Dazed and confused? Not me. I’m just Lost in the Cheese Aisle.

Friday, April 18, 2014

SMIT-WIT-FISS

Some people use clocks and calendars to measure the passage of time. I use my SMTWTFS.

Oh, you don’t know what a SMTWTFS is? It’s one of those little plastic thingumabobs that holds your pills. It has a separate box for each day of the week, each box labeled with the initial of the day: thus, SMTWTFS. I pronounce it “Smit-Wit-Fiss.”

Every evening, I pop open my SMTWTFS and remove that day’s supply of Old Man Medicine: baby aspirin, statin pill, fish oil capsules, vitamin D... plus an anti-allergy pill in the springtime, when pollen lies thick on the land. I swallow the small handful of pills and capsules in one gulp, chased by a shot of water straight from the bathroom tap. (She Who Must Be Obeyed is appalled by the fact that I drink bathroom water, believing that it somehow becomes contaminated by Poop-Cooties by virtue of its passage through pipes located within fifty feet of a Water-Closet. Go figure.)

Once all the boxes are empty, it is of course time to reload. I fill each of the seven compartments with my various medicaments, taking that evening’s dose directly out of the bottles. Thus I only have to recharge the SMTWTFS once every eight days. That’s efficiency for you!

And thus I gauge the passage of my days, eight at a time. O, how they fly in their octal progression, alas!

6 comments:

Kevin Kim said...

I've seen Smit-Wit-Fisses in the States. I should show you a photo of the Korean equivalent, in which the weekdays are written in Chinese. Strangely enough, the Chinese themselves don't use Chinese to note weekdays: they use numbers. Monday, in China, is Day 1; Tuesday is Day 2, and so on. Korean and Japan, however, reckon the days in Chinese like this:

MON: 月 (weol, 월, moon)
TUE: 火 (hwa, 화, fire)
WED: 水 (su, 수, water)
THU: 木 (mok, 목, tree/wood)
FRI: 金 (geum, 금, gold/metal, Kim)
SAT: 土 (to, 토, earth/ground)
SUN: 日 (il, 일, sun/day)

Ah—I found a picture of a Sino-Korean Smit-Wit-Fiss pill case online, but this one is pretty anal-retentive, as it includes space for breakfast pills, lunch pills, and dinner pills.

Behold.

Erica said...

I tend to pronounce the SMTWTFS as "Sunday, Monday, Then What The F**k (?) Saturday." I'm sure it's just a regional difference, or how we were raised.

Elisson said...

Kevin, I'm familiar with the Japanese days-of-the-week nomenclature, including the kanji: Getsu-yobi, ka-yobi, su-yobi, moku-yobi, kin-yobi, do-yobi, nichi-yobi. It was always easy to remember Friday (kin-yobi) because that was payday, the day on which you'd get your gold!

og said...

I have the five day AM/PM one. yeah, aspirin, fish oil, vit. d. I don't need the statins, apparently, my old man stuff involves BP meds and heart rhythm tabs. Both of which tend to be AM/PM stuff. I mostly like it because I immediately know if I've missed a dose.

Elisson said...

Yeah, Og, I didn't even raise the issue of the AM/PM SMTWTFS, which complicates matters somewhat, I suppose. I only take my meds once a day, just before bedtime, so I need not concern myself with the exact timing of my druggage. (Hooray for me, huh?)

og said...

Hell to get old, I expect. Dad already had one foot in the grave at my age. I would like to see my kid graduate college but then all bets are off.