Recovery

Hi. My name is Allison [chorus of "hi Allison"] and it's been 16 months since my last Advil.

Aspirin was my gateway drug. By college I was hitting the Tylenol pretty hard. Then one fateful day in grad school someone offered me some Advil and I was hooked. Whereas aspirin and Tylenol often had little impact on my headaches, Advil took care of them instantly. As long as I had a bottle of Advil on hand, I was invincible. And I never went anywhere without that bottle.

Turns out tho', that if you use a lot of ibuprofin, your brain comes to like it. And brains are a bit like toddlers; they figure out pretty quickly that the best way to get what they want is to throw a tantrum. By my 40s, daily headaches were my brain's version of a 2-year-old throwing himself on the floor and screaming. Brain needs ibuprofin; brain gets headache to get ibuprofin.

So, yes, I'm a recovering ibuprofin addict. Is that pathetic or what? Most addictions at least begin with pleasure. You get a high, a kick, a buzz, a rush. Or so I'm told. But what would I know?--my addiction began with a headache. "Well," said Keith the other night, "when you first started taking ibuprofin, your headaches went away. So that was a form of pleasure." I glared at him and explained in my "I'm talking calmly and slowly but say one more wrong word and I will hurt you" voice that the absence of pain is not, in fact, an equivalent for pleasure.

At least if I were recovering from some other sort of addiction I'd have the memory of good times, of late nights and dancing and gales of laughter, of the delightful and the delectable. . . you know, life on the edge, a bit of risky business. But no, no decadence and debauchery with ibuprofin. Just a total nerd addiction, a dweeb dependence. One neurologist told me that by taking too much Advil I have permanently bruised my brain. And I didn't even get to have fun.