Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 31 December 2015

It was one tablet after another — legal and illegal

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For me, last year started with an appalling whitey outside a pub after swallowing a second ecstasy tablet because I thought the first wasn’t working. I was saved by a young woman yelling ‘Catch me!’ and taking a running jump into my arms — which forced me back to the physical realm — and by being violently sick. The ecstasy came in the form of small white circular unmarked pharmaceutical-grade tablets. The second was passed on to my tongue via the tongue of someone I had met for the first time two minutes before.

After that, 2015 was one tablet after another — legal and illegal. I also injected. Once a quarter, I stood beside an orange plastic NHS chair, dropped my trousers and a nurse administered a depot injection of a drug called decapeptyl into the soft flesh of an upper buttock. Decapeptyl inhibits my testosterone production to almost nothing. We alternated buttocks. ‘It was the left/right one last time, wasn’t it, dear?’ she’d say. Decapeptyl is a clear syrupy liquid, of which I receive 10ml. The gloop sits under the surface of my skin and I can trace its lumpy outline with a finger.

The decapeptyl stops all testosterone production except the little contributed by my adrenal glands. To mop that up, and make me unambiguously female, every morning throughout 2015 I swallowed four white torpedo-shaped 250mg tablets of a drug called abiraterone. I am blessed with an unusually wide gullet and could fire them down all four at a time. I never missed a day. I never missed my daily burgundy and caramel caplet of tamsulosin, either. Latterly the abiraterone pills made me tire easily, and I swallowed them resentfully. It wasn’t ever like that with the tamsulosin.

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