Friday, February 15, 2008

Fare Thee Well Pill Caddy

When I came home from the hospital 17 days after my transplant, I was physically weak and mentally challenged. I left with a bag full of drugs and many pages of instructions regarding how and when to take my medications. The pharmacy had thrown in a little bonus gift with my thousands of dollars worth of pills, a plastic pill sorter with 28 compartments. It made me want to weep, not because of the pharmacy's generosity, but because I realized I'd gone from a person who never took a vitamin to one who took so many drugs they needed to be counted and compartmentalized on a daily and weekly basis. My friend Dianne was there with me the morning I tried to read all the dosages and get all the instructions straight. Take with food, avoid grapefruit, take this drug 2 hours before this one, don't take these pills on the day you come to clinic, take once a day, twice a day, three times a day. The pill caddy saved me.

The pill caddy is retiring today and moving to Florida. It deserves it. I'm down to 4 drugs a day (not counting vitamins) and 3 of them I take once daily. So the honking plastic behemoth with its 28 hard-to-pry-open doors is no longer taking up an inconvenient amount of space on my kitchen counter. Every time I walk into the kitchen, I see the empty space where it once rested. It had been a fixture for nearly 5 months, and now it's gone. The order within the disorder that is my kitchen counter has vanished and chaos rushes in to fill the void.

1 comment:

bravenewfrickenworld said...

Your pill caddy will enjoy playing shuffleboard and eating earlybird specials in Boca or wherever. Nice of you to arrange it.

Your post comes at a perfect time. This morning I realized I have been ODing on my one liquid medication. I called the covering doc and my levels are okay so no harm done. Yeesh.

I was a little cocky - I thought I wasn't screwing anything up. I guess I thought wrong.

Congrats!!