210621 June 21, 2021

Before I get into the medicines I classify as being used for First Aid, I would like to touch on some of the others I still consider “drugs” or at least passed for drugs in my home. 

Alka-Seltzer is one I never took, but was still in our medicine cabinet. I always viewed Alka-Seltzer as a “big folks” drug and not made for kids. I rarely take it even today, and it has probably been two or three years since I did the “Pop-pop-fizz-fizz” thing. If I wanted that type of effect, Fizzies drink tablets were much more to my taste. I think it was the aspirin taste which I did not like, but I did not even know it contained aspirin back then.

        Even though I did not like Alka-Seltzer, I really enjoyed the music used in one of their more famous commercials:

  The next thing I remember was Pepto-Bismol, which I hated. If I was not sick to my stomach when I took it, I was after I did. I hated the chalky taste of that vile liquid and honestly remember it making me throw up more often than it made me feel better.

        We sometimes remember odd things from our past. Murine was used for your eyes, but I remember it had a strange property back then which I do not believe it has today. If I remember correctly, back then Murine would glow under "black lights". If you put it in your eyes and got under a black light your eyes would glow like those in a horror movie. This was a fun thing to do at the Lyric Theater, because they had black lights in the place as a way of giving you a little light to see by but not killing your night vision in the process. 

I still think of Blistex as a drug and not a First Aid remedy. The white cream in the little tin tubes was applied to many cold sores when I was young. It had a sting when applied which told me it was working. Of less a degree, Chapstick (which might be better called a First Aid product) was used more often for chapped lips, but if you really had some lip problems, Blistex was the solution.

Another drug which habituated in our medicine tablet was Ex-Lax. Unlike today’s version, our generation at least had chocolate tasting Ex-Lax. Perhaps it is best remembered by many for its use in “revenge” brownies where it was substituted for real chocolate to get back at someone for a misdoing, like stealing food in an office environment. I do remember taking it at some point in my life, but not very often.

A final drug which I only remember taking one time when I was young is Cod Liver Oil. Even the name disputed me back then and I don’t even like to think about where it actually comes from even today. The last time I actually took the stuff was in my early days in the Air Force when I was about to get some procedure done and was told to take it either before or afterwards. Somehow the pills do not bother me the way the oil did and for a long time I took fish oil pills on a daily basis.

Since I am making this week’s comments a little short, I want to remind you of one more thing that was in our medicine cabinet when I was growing up. It was a slot in the back of the cabinet in which you were supposed to dispose of your used safety razor blades. I never used it because I was barely shaving by the time I graduated and I never started out with a safety razor anyway. I took my first shave with a Norelco electric rotary shaver. But, many others found the slot in the back of the medicine cabinet a safe way to dispose of used double-sided razor blades. Few probably had little clues what actually happed to the blades once they were slid into the slot. Actually, they ended up in the wall of the house or fell through to the ground beneath.