VYE-ta-min D

Mar 13, 2010

I pulled my hood up and ran from my front door to the shelter of the elevated highway, where I could remain relatively dry for five blocks before I had to turn left and head up the street to Walgreens pharmacy to fill a prescription.

I hunkered down and walked as fast as I could, but by the time I made it into the store, my pants looked like oil-soaked rags and my feet sloshed around in soggy socks.

"It'll be ready in about half an hour," the pharmacist said after I handed her the script.

With the weather the way it was, I decided to kill time in the store.

As I perused the cough and cold remedies, a pre-recorded voice kept repeating itself over the intercom: "Customer Service to Shaving Knees, Customer Service to Shaving Knees..." Huh? She had to say it several times before I realized it wasn't saying, "Shaving Knees," but rather "Shaving Needs." Not nearly as provocative. Something was alluring about the prim and proper -- though with a slight wild-on-the-weekends huskiness -- voice beckoning customer service to the knee shaving section. I pictured a nurse in a pristine, white, starched linen dress and white patent leather Mary Janes set up in the middle of an aisle with a razor and a leather strop waiting for Customer Service to arrive. Fantasies aside, it was still a bit of a mystery why Customer Service was so desperately needed in the shaving cream aisle.

VYE-ta-min D, it said on the printed insert stapled to the paper bag containing my pills. I said it out loud, with exaggerated phonetics. "VYE-ta-min D? What in 'tarnation?"

"That'll be sixty dollars," said the pharmacist.

"Wha?"

"Six dollars."

"Oh, whew, I thought you said sixty. I was about to flip my lid."

Recent blood tests had shown me to be significantly deficient in Vitamin D. "It could be what's behind your recent bone breaks," my doctor had said. I'd been told once before, about a year ago, that I was deficient in Vitamin D, and I was already taking a vitamin D supplement (when I remembered to take it, that is), but apparently a few hundred units per day wasn't doing the trick. My new pills pack a whopping 50,000 units of the elusive VYE-ta-min D in a green gelcap that I'm supposed to take once a week. "I’ll see you again in three months," the doctor said when he prescribed it.

"Not if I see you first."