The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . .
And so begins Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson’s brilliant account of a drug-fuelled road trip. It bears many striking similarities to my own journey back to my parents’ house…
Inside the boot of my brother’s car was my duffel bag. It contained a pack of 400mg Mesalazine enteric coated tablets, a box of 5mg Prednisolone tablets, 100 200mg Ferrous Sulphate pills, a tub of 1.25g + 5 micrograms Calcium Carbonate chewables, Co-Dydramols, and of course, the enemas…
Uncanny, isn’t it? So there I was, back at mum’s with a bag of unpronounceable drugs; red ones, white ones, chalky ones and big pointy ones you stick where the sun don’t shine. Each had its own individual mission in the battle to beat my ulcerative colitis. The Mesalazine were the infantry, the solid, dependable backbone of the assault, the Prednisolone a crack squad of small yet powerful commandos. They say an army marches on its stomach; well this army would march in the stomach. I imagined my little soldiers advancing under the cover of darkness (well, it’s always dark inside your tummy) and overpowering the ulcerative colitis in a swift and deadly demonstration of sheer brute force. Like a V-2 rocket, the enema would be sent in to finish the job. Victory would be ours and peace would once more return to my belly. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, maybe it was the effect of the drugs on my imagination, I don’t know, but I like to think that somewhere inside my bowel, deep behind enemy lines, a little red Prednisolone tablet was giving the enemy a right good hiding.
