Sick of Him...

"...and then Te..."

Janie interrupted her friend, "Could you not mention his name? In fact could we change the subject altogether? I'm not feeling very well."

"Oh my god! You did it! Where were you even able to get it?"

Janie gave a wan smile, still feeling a little green around the gills she wasn't sure if talking about the pills would make it worse or better. She waved Paula away, "Give me a little bit to feel myself again, okay?"

"Okay, but we are going to talk about this. I have questions."

"I'm sure you do."

After a few minutes of chatting about the weather Janie finally felt like she wasn't about to vomit all over the table. "Gloria's friend has a friend who got me a bottle."

Paula was glad to be back on the subject she really wanted to discuss. "But I thought they were illegal?"

"Well I didn't exactly go to a store and buy them from him. Gloria and I were talking and she asked if I wanted them and I said sure so, there you go. It's only temporary."

Gloria nodded. That's how they had been marketed. Like Antabuse for alcoholics. Something that would make you so ill you would not drink anymore, except in this case it was think instead of drink. Cognitive therapy in a pill with negative effects to speed it along.

"And is it working?"

"Well I literally get sick to my stomach when my mind wanders and as you saw even hearing his name in conversation is enough to make me want to hurl so...I guess?"

"You guess?"

"It's giving me all of the negative symptoms but it's not really keeping me from thinking about him. It's less Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and more Eternal Sickness of the Queasy Stomach. Probably won't be as beloved of a movie."

"If it's doing nothing but making you miserable why don't you stop?"

"I can't. The side effects of stopping mid dosing schedule are severe. That's why they got pulled from the market. Too many people decided that the nausea was worse than the heartbreak and quit early. Then...well..."

Gloria remembered. People died. The drug company tried to blame it on something else but the tie was too strong. Their customer's hearts would give out during withdraw. People tried to make it romantic, the broken heart death. But the bottom line was people died. It didn't stop them from wanting the drug though. The lab moved to some island without regulations and kept making the pills and people kept buying them.

"How many days is a full cycle?"

"Thirty days to make a habit so they say do it for sixty to make sure it sticks."

"Two months? That's a long time to be sick to your stomach."

"Well to be fair I was feeling fairly sick to my stomach before the pills so it's not much different. Now I know if I think about technical things like medication and side effects it goes away."

"How long have you been on them?"

"A week."

"Oh man...."

"Yeah, it's a ways to go. But bright side I should lose the 10 pounds I put on with the cry and eat ice cream first portion of the breakup." Janie tried to joke but it was too close to thinking about him and she felt the wave hit her stomach.

Gloria watched Janie's face go from normal to pained, "So how's work?"

She had a feeling she would get very good at changing the subject over the next few months.