Pillow for a bitter pill

15 YEARS AGO I was incredibly thankful for marshmallow fluff.

On some odd whim – hey, it’s on sale for only pennies a jar! – sometime in the previous year we had bought several containers of marshmallow fluff. Perfect for desserts or fluffernutters or whatever Gwen thought we might someday make. Naturally, we put them to the back of a kitchen shelf and forgot about them.

Until I started on chemotherapy.

Part of the regimen was taking pills, and that included a daily dose of prednisone. This medicine is a wonder-steroid used in the treatment of dozens of diseases, disorders and complaints. And you’d think that with it in such high demand, someone would make a prednisone tablet that was coated, or otherwise masked the fact that the pill tastes AWFUL.

Sure, it’s only in your mouth for a moment, but that’s all it takes for you to want to retch. And feeling like you want to vomit is not conducive to getting necessary medications to go down and stay down. And I got to look forward to this ordeal day after day, two weeks on, two weeks off, for six months.

Maybe if we put the pill in something to mask the nastiness, we thought (hey, it works for dogs, right?). So Gwen hunted through the pantry and, with triumph, she produced a jar of marshmallow fluff.

In the coming weeks she became a master at enrobing the obnoxious pill in a pillow of white sweetness. Between the fluff’s tendency to melt in the mouth and the pill corrupting the flavor of the coating I still had to swallow fast. But it did go down a lot easier.

One day she absent-mindedly licked the fluff off of her fingers, and it had just a trace of prednisone residue in it.

“Ugh!” she exclaimed. “That IS awful. I’m so sorry you have to swallow that.”

From then on, she was extra careful to ensure the pill was completely covered, and extra careful not to accidentally taste it again.

We were so glad when I finally took my last dose of prednisone. As it happened, we were on our last jar of fluff.

That was fine. As grateful as we are to the stuff for helping us get through those months, it would be years before we would even consider eating that stuff again.


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