High blood pressure finally got me this year, and I started taking amlodipine to calm it down a bit.
It took me a while to decide to take the drug as it felt like a huge step: a lifetime drug regime and someone who hates medication don’t go well together.
After dithering for 10 days or so, I took the plunge.
The plunge was in September, and by January two things were clear. My blood pressure had not come down significantly and was stubbornly stuck on the 32nd floor like a broken elevator. And secondly, I had gained the ruddy complexion of a farmer in a children’s story book circa 1955.
This bacon face is a known side-effect. It showed the drug had done something at least.
I consulted the doc by phone, this being Covid City. No problem, he said. We’ll double the dose. That will work. But will it, I asked, make the side-effects worse ? If it does, he replied, rather discouragingly, we will top it up with something else.
A month later, and by now something like a cross between a red-legged partridge and a hugely embarrassed lobster, my throat was swollen, and swallowing was a bit of a problem. Another side-effect. I consulted the doc again, and got a different one on the end of the line.
This doc was not a listener, and he was a little too quick in prescribing another tablet to deal with things. Another tablet ? Yes. He must have thought I was one of those old people who talk about ‘a tablet for my water’, or ‘my blue tablet’, happy to have no clue about what the drug might be, or what it might do.
The drug was ramipril. I will not be taking it. The side-effects are horrendous, no doubt to be ameliorated by some other drug and on and on. Remember the Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee Watcher from Dr Suess ? Well like that.
But it got me thinking. Amlodipine and ramipril sound so different. Amlodipine (the o is short as in ‘plod’) sounds if not avuncular, at least friendly. It could be the name of some vegetarian dinosaur. You can be sure it would have a smile as it munched. It’s the vowel sounds I think, and the open ‘am’ at the start. The word exudes some kind of medical warmth.
Ramipril, on the other hand. Well, what does the sound make you feel ? To me, it sounds like something for unblocking drains, poking a hole in something hard, or maybe something you sit on and wash you hadn’t. If it was an animal, it would be hiding in the shrubbery to take a chuck out of your unsuspecting calf as you walked by.
Again, it’s the aggressive onset – ram – followed by two prim ‘i’ sounds. It the sort of sound you might make when chewing a wasp. It has all the warmth of a block of frozen urine falling from a plane on some unfortunate pedestrian.
No wonder I have such difficulty with medication. But really. Names matter, right ?