Pills

I had somehow considered myself impervious to the idea that I would ever have to join my “older” friends in managing the pill brigade that some of them seem to ingest. Even my very healthy husband has ended up with a couple of pillboxes residing on the bathroom counter (so we don’t forget to take them, right?) and another set of vitamin and other supplements jars that move in and out of the “pill basket” next to the kitchen sink, and others that hibernate in the refrigerator.

Now I’ve suddenly joined that brigade bigtime! And what a management pain it is. Over the past month and a half, I have acquired no less than 8 different vitamin/supplement pills or concoctions that I am to take each day, most of them 3 times per day. Pain meds, when taken, are in addition. The easiest to manage are the ones with meals, as long as you are home. The hardest to manage is the herbal tea that I “assigned” myself (called Essiac), because it is to be taken on an empty stomach. That means one hour before eating or two hours after. Try to find a time in the day when THAT fits! I am currently managing to get to it first thing in the morning, and sometimes just before bed. This one is also refrigerated, so it doesn’t travel easily, if at all.

Since most of the remaining supplements have to be taken with meals, they have joined the kitchen counter basket, which is now crammed to the brim, with some spillover to the adjacent counter. Ah me, this messiness is being produced by the neatnik who put the basket there in the first place, in the hopes of keeping the myriad bottles in some kind of order, and making it reasonably easy to clean around them!

The big contest is when I’m not at home—even for a single meal. First challenge is the Chinese herbs I’m taking, a wonderfully bitter concoction for which I need hot water in order to dissolve the mix. I prefer to take these herbs before meals, because that way I can use the food that follows to get rid of the lingering bitter taste. But they’re unhandy to try to take care of when on the road (may I have a third of a glass of hot water, please?)—and that’s assuming I remembered to put a dosage in some kind of container to take with me. Then I also have to bundle up my supplement mix for that meal and try to remember both to take it with me, and to take it while eating. My score card so far is less than stellar.

I have already made the first of what promises to be several trips to the drug store and my local “container” store to try to find the appropriate vehicles to ferry all this stuff around. Regular pill boxes don’t work, because they’re intended for much smaller pills than my gargantuan vitamins. Better so far seem to be small individual containers, but I also guessed wrong on the size I needed for those. So sometime in the next week it’s back to the container store for another round. I also will have to plan differently for longer ventures of a week or a month—small plastic bags seem the most flexible so far. My local donation organizations may be a little surprised at the rejected containers that come along in the new few months. And (sigh), I guess I have to acknowledge that I have somehow, at last, become part of the older adult pill-toting brigade.