Thanks for sharing this, I wrote a poem about this too (only time I’ve felt the urge to write poetry about, well, anything) and figured I could share it here. Hang in there.
“Regret- Or, Finasteride”
I stood there in my hallway
And looked down at the pills
Orange and round and small they were
But potent for my ills
Round and round and round I’d gone
“Well are these safe to take?”
“Of course they are” the doctor said
But others cried “mistake!”
Still, my hair- it thinned and thinned
And desperate did I grow
“How bad could it be?” I asked myself
But little did I know
Side effects aren’t quite the term
To sum up what’s transpired
They’re not just on the side, you see
My whole life seems expired
I can’t sleep, nor can I think
My eyes- raw nerves, exposed
My manhood’s gone, my hormones wrong
The future’s door looks closed
I’m not too much myself since then
Just a shadow, ghost, or shell
The best of me’s beset by poison
The rest of me’s in hell
“A pill did this?” You cry, a skeptic
As I beg to be believed
“It really did” I must insist
“And it’s not to be relieved”
I’ve lost myself, and much besides
These hellish months and years
But there’s one thing that haunts and haunts me
A vision blurred by tears…
…it goes like this: I’m in the hallway
The pills are in my hand
My body’s fine, the future’s mine
I can grasp it where I stand
But before I take that poison pill
This time I am distracted
For from the shadows, out steps me
My future self, refracted
We lock eyes, myself and I
We stare and stare and stare
Then he steps forward, that me-to-be
His eyes filled with despair
“Please just don’t” he whispers then
His voice a ghostly plea
He looks so old, so sick, so tired
And he is begging me
I see it then, I see it all
The nightmare I invite
A future bleak and full of pain
Preventable tonight
My whole life turns upon this axis
This one inflection point
And if I never took those pills
This future I’d disjoint
I throw them out, those 30 pills
And gaze about in wonder
That future me, no more to be
Time’s fabric rent asunder
My life moves on, a happy song
A tragedy escaped
That ghost that I was to become
Has had his past reshaped…
…Then I wake up, back in the present
And reality floods in
The past is fixed, it’s set in stone
I’ve made my bed to lie in
But I see him still, my past self
Standing in the hall
The pills in hand, the future blank
About to lose it all.
