Tag: parents

Count me in

Counting pills, the final year. April 2018.

Every week I count out three different prescription pills and one over-the-counter drug into a one-week pill minder. Every week I think of my mother doing the same.

My brother and I traded exasperated texts when one of us witnessed this. By the time I shot the photo above, Mom had only eight months until others would count out the pills for her, and she had but 18 months left with us. She’s closer to 89 than 88 in that photo. Never strong in linear thought and simple arithmetic progressions, aging had taken a bit more away from what once was there. Our exasperation hid our anguish at several things: who in their right mind would think it’s a great idea to make tiny little white pills which will be taken mostly by old people with arthritic hands? And shouldn’t it be a regulation that no pill can look exactly like another? And how can a person not just look inside the pill minder partitions to see if there’s a pill in there before you start? Which of course left us with the question, how can one not notice when a pill isn’t taken one day of the week?

Having worked in pharmaceutical manufacturing, I have a formalized method for dispensing my pills, and for taking them.

  • Open the container and flip out all ‘leftovers’. (I sometimes elect not to take the decongestant so I have leftovers.)
  • Take prescription blood pressure medicine #1. Drop one into each partition. Double-check that it’s just one-per-cell. Close that pill bottle. Turn it upside down.
  • Take prescription #2. Cut a tab in half. Drop one half each into the first two cells. Work left to right and repeat for cells 3-4 and 5-6. Drop another half tab into the seventh day’s cell. Close that bottle. Turn it upside down.
  • Start the same for prescription #3, dropping two tabs in each cell.
  • Cut seven tabs of the OTC drug in half, dropping the split tab each time into a cell.
  • When it comes time to take the day’s pills, flip out the day’s cell into a little pill cup I have, then put one half OTC tab back in. At the end of my breakfast, dump the contents of the pill cup into my palm. Stop. Stare at the pills to be sure I know each of them and that there are the right number of each. Swallow them down.

“Rigidity for the things which should be rigid,” is my motto. Otherwise I don’t care. (Okay, yeah I do, but that’s a lengthier post about borderline OCD-ness.) Yet…when I dispense my pills each week, I think of how difficult this was for my mother when she was but 15 or so years older than I am now. I don’t believe she had nearly as much trouble when she was 70. What’s coming down the road? Why couldn’t I see that being 88 is not like being 64?

Next week: how to torture yourself about any trivial thing for the rest of your life. Please prepare by reflecting on your teenaged years and the relationship you had with your parents.

The most poignant time…

My parents’ neighbor’s resurrected Christmas tree decoration. Christmas 2023. [Photo by current owner of the house.]

Christmas waits impatiently on the other side of midnight, less than five hours away on the East Coast of the US. Besides its ultimate meaning, Christmas carries a bagful of gifts called memories: some good, some painful, some both. When my family returned to Spokane after a 22-month period of moves to Seattle, Los Angeles, and back to Spokane, the neighbors across the street organized a block Christmas decorating project. They lived in the house pictured above. All the men–times differed a bit back then–gathered in the double-car garage just out of the photo to the right, all of the women kept them stocked with hot or cold beverages of their choice, and all of us children ran around in the snow and threw snowballs at each other. For several years our block featured wooden trees lit colorfully…almost as in this photo.

One by one fewer trees appeared each year. This person moved. That person got tired of the maintenance involved. (Ours needed a new stake to keep it upright in the nearly frozen ground.) By the mid-70’s the folks in the pictured house–the ones who instigated the tree-building–had moved, all of the neighborhood children were grown, the trees had disappeared entirely, and ours began its 45-year hibernation in the rafters of our garage.

In 2013 my father died, and in 2019 my mother joined him. Through 2018 the new neighbors in the brick house across the street had taken care of my mother as she declined, assisting her with all those little tasks that get more difficult as one nears 90. My brother lived hundreds of miles away, while I lived thousands. We did nothing with the house during the ten months she alternated quarters in the rehab center or the assisted living facility, but after she had passed we went through the stuff and asked neighbors if they wanted anything. Our neighbor wanted the tree. He spent a couple years before he souped it up with the reflectors, but other than that he returned it to its original condition. It seems appropriate it now lives where it came into being. I ran across this photo looking back through December photos. Funny how so much can be packed into one unassuming photograph.