Posts Tagged ‘blog’

Heartburn and A Pepcid Mystery 5-11-11

Hey all you 20 somethings, here’s a typical Fat and Sloppy story:  Talk to most middle aged guys and they’ll tell you a variation of what I’m telling you now.  Being an American means you have the right to eat whatever you want whenever you want.  I cherish and often abuse that right.  When I was young, I could eat anything.   But being middle aged, I still eat everything, but eating poorly and rarely exercising is now beginning to take it’s toll on me.  One result of being out of shape is that heartburn is my constant companion.

Instead of changing my eating habits, I prefer to soothe my heartburn with a pill.  Of all the chewable remedies I have used for heart burn, only Pepsid has worked and it tastes great.  My favorite is the berry blend chewable tablet.  I hate the mint flavor tablets because they taste like tooth paste. When I feel the burn, I slide a few berry flavored pills into my mouth.  I happily wait as those flavored wafers silently dissolve in my mouth.  I don’t swallow anything  until they have completely dissolved.  Then, with my mouth loaded with its saliva/spit/Pepcid mixture, I swallow the savory broth.  Yum.

It quickly and gently coats my esophagus and stops the heart burn.   Another tasty fat and sloppy experience I look forward to on a daily basis.

Then something mysterious happened, about four months ago, Pepcid vanished from stores.  Costco didn’t have it, my grocery store didn’t have it, and pharmacies didn’t have them.   No one would say what happened, or would admit to me where the Pepcid had disappeared to.

I pursued the mystery by checking the Internet, blogs, discussion boards and I asked doctors.  Stupidly, I didn’t think to check the Pepcid website which would have been the first logical place to look.  That might have helped me.  Nothing came up though; not a peep about what happened to Pepsid.   It felt like a good friend had suddenly disappeared and no one but me was looking for him.

Happily, about a month ago, Pepcid finally reappeared in stores. According to the Pepcid web site, it came back on March 11, 2011.  It tastes the same, but its not the powerful, soothing friend I used to know.  This Pepcid is weaker.  I can tell because it now takes more wafers and saliva to soothe my heart burn.

I don’t know why it disappeared in the first place, or why Pepcid corporate weakened the wafers, but I do know one thing; no one is talking about this mystery.   And I can’t find anything about it on the Internet.