We will begin with a very horrible cautionary tale.
My sister has told me this, and so I know it is entirely and completely true, it is not the sort of scare story you read on Facebook. She is a GP and knows about these things, and so I think it is worth passing on.
A friend of hers has a son in his early twenties who was taking prescription drugs for depression. Unfortunately these wiped away his positive, happy moments as well as the bleak ones, and he decided to resort to another medicine that he had used on a doctor’s prescription in the past, and which he felt worked better.
Regrettably he did not get this from his GP. He did not ask his GP for it.
Instead he bought it from an online pharmacy.
The pharmacy had a truthful-looking web page. He paid by credit card and everything seemed to be fine. When the drugs came they looked as genuine as drugs can ever look. They were in a proper sealed box, with an information leaflet and they were in the usual pop-out foil arrangement, and so he took them.
They were not genuine drugs, but some sort of pharmaceutical poison, with all sorts of magical anti-depressant ingredients. They seem not to have been made maliciously but simply with indifference and stupidity.
He had a heart attack and was found unconscious on the floor of his flat. He was given CPR for forty minutes by the ambulance crew, and he survived, but suffered such severe brain damage that he has become totally paralysed.
He is able to communicate using an eye-gaze machine, although very little because it is such a strain on his collapsed body and mind.
He saw his mother and spelled out: sorry.
He is dying. He is now on a pathway of palliative care until it is finally over.
I am telling you this because we have used online pharmacies before, although not for anything especially exciting.
I shall certainly not be using them again. My loyalty to Mr Carter the Chemist in the village has been renewed a thousandfold, and I suggest that you consider a similar tactic, although obviously not Mr. Carter since you don’t live here. I have heard that Boots are pretty good.
It is a horrid story, and I have shared it simply because I thought it is a useful thing to know. If one young man has met such a terrible fate, his story should at least stop anybody else from doing the same.
My sister has gone now, off on her attempt to walk across the country. She is not going to do this all at once, but in a series of little walks, some of which will include my nephew, who is as excited about walking as most teenagers, and some of which will probably be by herself.
She has taken her camper van and disappeared. I was sorry to see her go, it has been nice to have her around for a couple of days.
I had to dive upstairs for a couple of hours after dinner last night, and leave her to watch Mark inventing the thing that he is currently inventing, this is the wire thing that I don’t believe in. I could not stay and join in because it was my course, which was truly splendid.
The current tutor is really jolly good. I do not at all like the idea of screenwriting and think probably I will not do it when I grow up, but he is rivetingly interesting all the same. The bit of my dystopian novel that I am writing at the moment is all dialogue, at which I am rubbish, but I was so inspired that I rushed back to it this morning to change some bits that whilst not exactly wrong, could have been done better.
That isn’t quite true, actually they were rubbish.
I have written a bit more of it today whilst I was feeling creative, partly because it was raining too hard to do anything else. I tramped all over the fells in the rain this morning and thought about it.
So far I have written eleven thousand, three hundred and thirty five words. That is only eighty eight thousand, six hundred and six five to go.
I have practically finished.
