MAY CAUSE DIZZYNESS

appears in big, bold capital letters across all nine prescription bottles. As I'm doling out little white pills to everyone in the family, I have visions of staggering children falling over furniture and falling down stairs. As I take mine, I decide I will not be dizzy because I have dinner guests coming in one hour. The little white pills are to eradicate any possible parasites that we may have contracted from K who may have parasites he could have passed along. It's all very iffy. But now we can rest comfortably knowing that said pills are actively killing off any we may have. River blindness? Gone! Roundworm? Gone! Scabies? Gone! Gone! Gone! Which is good, because for the last week, I've been feeling itchy, but only when I think about scabies. Much like when a friend calls to say her child has lice and you can immediately feel the little things crawling on you scalp. (Feel free to pause here to scratch your own head.) But back to the communal drug ingesting...we all need to take two doses, each separated by two weeks. I suppose it's not too surprising that our local pharmacy didn't have enough for all of us and had to order it. I opted to wait for all the medicine to arrive before doling it out because I didn't feel up to having nine people on nine different time tables. Happily no one had any reactions and we now know that all the children, minus K, can swallow pills. I feel less itchy already.