Further negotiations with a finicky alkaloid

Happy Day of Silence, everyone.

So I woke up this morning with a touch of menstrual cramps. This is always a troubling circumstance because OTC painkillers don't work very well on me in the recommended doses. You can raise the dose a little bit safely, but yesterday I'd already used a 600 mg dose of ibuprofen (where the bottle recommends 200-400) and I didn't really want to take large doses 2 days in a row. So I decided to take 400 mg instead and potentiate it with caffeine. I didn't have time to make tea or get coffee, but I had a couple of 200 mg caffeine tablets from a long time ago. I figured only 50-100 mg would be necessary to activate the ibuprofen but I just took a whole tablet (disgusting and bitter, they need to use a better binder) because my experience said 200 mg wasn't a big deal even if it was more than I needed for this application.

Apparently 200 mg is a lot more than anything I've drunk recently, however, because my train of thought went haywire and I found it very hard to concentrate on my chemistry quiz. I knew what I was doing, but I may not have done it very carefully because I had to work fast just to keep my mind from jumping ahead in the problem, or to another problem. The painkilling scheme worked though. It's gone down a bit now - the hand-trembling caffeine test (try to hold your hand still in front of you and see how much it shakes) says it's still working some mojo, but less than earlier, and the mental chaos is much subsided. Next time I'll go to the trouble to bite the tablet in half, or even quarters perhaps on a morning like this, when I woke up half an hour before my alarm and decidedly do NOT need any extra stimulation.