Little Blue Pills of Paranoia

As a result of the Allergy Attack that Destroyed Tokyo, I was put on some ridiculously expensive pills that are supposed to build up my immune system to make sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen again.

I have two pills that I'm supposed to take each day. A cute yellowish one for the mornings, and a soothing blue one for at night. Each one is roughly the size of a medium kiwi fruit, only less furry. Theoretically the yellow one is supposed to keep you functional during the day, and the blue one helps you sleep at night. (This is totally not the case, but we'll get to that.)

Originally this was supposed to be a 10 day regimen of drugs (that cost about as much as my daily food allowance), but a follow-up call from the doctor has extended it to a full thirty days. Which I'm not sure if I'm going to make it through, since one of the side effects (besides the financially crippling one. $5 dollars a day. For pills. Jesus.) is extreme paranoia.

Well, Blue Pill Paranoia. The yellow ones are great. Sure, at first they turned me into a walking zombie, where my arms didn't really seem to belong to my body and I would constantly lose my train of thought and start staring off into space. And they caused me to laugh uncontrollably at things that weren't even remotely funny. We're talking hideous outbursts of geek laughter, complete with the little snort and everything. In front of people I didn't even know. Like:

Coworker: "Yeah, so long day, huh?"
Jason: "HAHAHAHA *snort*!".

Remember when I said I don't get embarrassed anymore? I was wrong. But eventually my body got used to the dosage, and now everything is great. I love my little yellow friend.

But those blue guys. Okay, when I first started taking them, I had just finished that book I was reading (House of Leaves. Very good. Surprisingly scary, considering.). That first night I had this really creepy dream and woke up in the middle of the night completely convinced that there was something horrible in my room, and that I just couldn't see it yet. That maybe it was in the closet, or under the bed, or *gasp* invisible. So I did what any self-respecting 24 year-old would do - piled all my pillows up around me and hid under the covers shivering for half an hour until I fell back to sleep.

When the alarm went off in the morning, I chalked the entire thing up to that dumb book and my lack of sleep over the weekend and went on with my day.

Only when I went to bed that night, I woke up about 45 minutes later absolutely convinced that I had just heard my patio door open, and that there were robbers in my house, right at that very moment. And that they were totally going to steal all of my stuff. But what if they tried to come in my room, I would need some sort of weapon, but I don't have anything laying around that I could use, maybe the lamp, but it's too big, actually you know maybe I should just run over and lock the door, then I could hear whenever they were trying to get in, and I could work on the whole weapon issue later.

So I actually got up out of bed, snuck over to the door, locked it, and again huddled under my covers until I fell asleep.

The next morning I realized that this might represent a pattern. And sure enough, I am now Crazy McParanoid every night now, thanks to my loverly new sleep-time drugs. Last night I was convinced that there was something else breathing in my room. Turned out it was the fan on my computer.

Of course, rampant paranoia is not listed as one of the known side-effects on the container, so maybe I'm just losing my mind, and I'm blaming the pills so I won't have to deal with my sudden decline into insanity. Either way, I would stay away from my house late at night for a while, just so you don't step in any of the crazy.