Drink Crazy, Die Slow

Note: This is part of a larger work-in-progress that is a fact-based, fictional account of the water supply. This portion is a look at how pharmaceuticals can travel from human waste to human mouths.

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The old man woke up and saw nothing. He hoped he was dead, but knew he wasn’t. Instead, he got up to take a piss, one of the worst experiences of his life lately, and one of the reasons he hoped for death each time he woke up.

Inside the old man’s bursting bladder, a swirling cacophony of pharmaceutical drugs waited to pour out: Metformin for his ever-worsening diabetes; Simvastatin for his fat-clogged arteries; Omeprazole for his scorching stomach acid; Quetiapine for his depression from being so sick; and Haloperidol for the early on-set dementia he has developed from being mostly alone ever since his wife died more than 15 years ago.

Once a strong runner who took pride in his muscular legs, he could now barely stand over the toilet, and had to use his right arm to lean against the wall behind the commode. With his left hand, he held his penis as a pharma-cocktail trickled out, burning his urethra, and making him wish, for the second time of the day, that he was dead already. 

To blunt the pain, he thought about the recurring dream he had been having lately. A good one. It was a memory of when he was 7-years-old and he and his father went fishing together out on Key Biscayne. They did that often. But the dream was this particular time when the old man was about seven or eight and got a bite so strong, he almost dropped his pole. HIs father helped him get it under control. Once it was, he let the old man reel it in. They both were in awe as the old man pulled a 10-pound red drum out of the water. It was the biggest fish the old man had ever caught and he remembered his father being so proud of him. That was the entire dream, and it was the only thing that made the old man feel happy these days. 

He finished pissing. His bladder was empty. The remnants of all the drugs he had taken the day before were now in the toilet. He flushed.

The water went through the city’s sewage pipes and into a wastewater treatment facility, where it mixed with hundreds of thousands of other people’s bladder and bowel discharges. The filtration process removed the solids (hard feces, toilet paper, tampons, used condoms)  but everything that was liquid (soft feces, blood, cleaning chemicals, drug-infused urine) washed out to the ocean. 

The bodily purges of millions of people  -  the liquid leftovers of their mental and physical illnesses, their anxiety and bad hearts, their schizophrenia and gender dysphoria, their obesity and depression, blasted into the waters near Biscayne Bay, the same water thousands of people swam in, fished in, and boated on everyday. Happy toddlers swam in antipsychotics they will one day take. Fast food billionaires yachted on high blood pressure medications that were necessary because of the food products that created their fortune. And somewhere in the water, all that pharmaceutical residue was seeping into the gills of an elderly, 10-pound red drum fish. 

For most of the fish’s life, the pharmaceuticals hadn’t had much of an effect. But over the past 10 years, he found it more difficult to find food and mates. His sense of smell didn’t match with his surroundings - he smelled things that weren’t there and didn’t smell things that were there, throwing all his survival instincts into. He also couldn’t ever smell female redfish, and had been unable to inseminate a partner in so long, the urge to do so evaporated from his instinct. Red spent his days floating aimlessly, somewhat looking for food, but accustomed to not being able to find it. Occasionally, a flight response triggered him into darting several meters in various directions, despite there being no predators around. And the racing heart panic that induces that responses would often remain for long periods of time, sometimes entire weeks, and the fish would swim with panicked aimlessness through cloudy, seaweed-filled waters, every aspect of his perception nothing but brief continuous explosions of panic he would forget immediately forget, only to have to endure another brief explosion of panic completely new to his brain. 

One day, as the fish felt a need to consume, but could no longer understand the pain or what to do about it, a thick cloud of yellow and brown exploded in front of him. He then felt a tingling sensation, like a weak but anxious fire scrambling across his body,  as his gills sucked in the latest batch of human anal and urethra excretions that were dumped into the ocean via millions of Miami toilets over the last seven days.

All the memories of patterns and smells and routes to safety evaporated from the fish’s brain. The only thing his eyes could comprehend was a flashing light above. And the only sensation he felt - aggressive hunger - told him to go there. He swam toward it, entranced by the sunlight glistening off the steel edges, his heart beating faster as he got nearer.

And then a needle stabbed the inside of his cheek and yanked him out of the water. He couldn’t breathe. The sun’s brightness enveloped him, a feeling that activated every danger sensor in his body. He flopped and shaked, but nothing happened. The light around him got brighter. His body rose higher, closer to the sun. The needle in his mouth had complete control over him. And then another creature, one he had never seen before, never seen anything like it, was looking at him. The creature showed its teeth. The fish shook and flopped some more frantically this time, the only thing it could do. But now it felt a hot, fleshy grip around its body as another thing he couldn’t see yanked the needle out of its mouth with violent power, lacerating the inside of the fish’s mouth. 

The pain was like nothing the fish ever felt before. Its ability to process his surroundings were overwhelmed, and he did not know in which direction he should swim (he didn’t realize he could no longer swim). The brightness of the sun was burning his vision, and he was losing his ability to move. He then felt one side of his body touch freezing cold rocks - the coldness another alien feeling he did not know how to comprehend - and all he could do was twitch as his body shut down and everything slowly turned to black.

The 7-year-old boy watched his father filet the fish with pride knowing that he caught the fish all by himself. He had been going fishing with his father more often since his parents divorced, but never caught anything big enough to be eaten. But his father whistled when he pulled up (with a little help from his father) the impressive red drum. And now, the boy watched him scrape its gills and carve its body for them to eat - a surefire sign that he caught a good one. 

Minutes later, after a quick fry, the boy’s father put a plate in front of him: a side of cold, leftover mac and cheese with a big, fried piece of the fish he caught. The boy loved mac and cheese, even cold, but he dug into the fish first. 

It tasted great. The salty, crusty, flaky skin gave way to soft, sweet meat. He ate it up fast, prouder than ever about his catch, his father watching him with a smirk and sipping on a bottle of Modelo.

Hours later, as the boy slept on a pullout mattress in his father’s new one-bedroom apartment, his small intestine broke up the remnants of the fish and soaked up all the nutrients to send throughout his body via his circulatory system. Along with the nutrients, other things inside the fish were spread throughout the boy’s body, too. This included traces of all the drugs an elderly man pissed out of his body three days prior: Metformin for diabetes; Simvastatin for clogged arteries; ,Omeprazole for stomach acid buildup; Quetiapine for depression; and Haloperidol for dementia.

It also included traces of drugs that millions of people pissed into toilet water that was eventually dumped into the ocean and soaked up by the fish over its 10 years of life. That included: antipsychotic drugs; gender hormone therapy drugs; cancer treatment drugs; weight-loss drugs; epilepsy drugs; asthma drugs; migraine drugs; pet drugs; insomnia drugs; party drugs; experimental drugs and thousands of other drugs that flow freely through the water supply were now inside the 7-year-old’s body, just like they had been for most of his life.

When the boy woke up the next morning, he felt uneasy. But that was how he always felt.