CB #18
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
I made my first of many “narcotics runs” to the pharmacy. Each time the pharmacist would want to meet with me. Each time, I would explain that I understood that he had “other” narcotics and that we needed to be careful, and so on and so on. I had taken care of my mother in her last days, I was well aware of the need to be careful and understand what we were doing… self medicating. Sometimes I had a question, like how to wean him off one as I put him on another and so on. But for the most part it was just another thing I had to endure.
Dave and I had NEVER, EVER taken drugs of this magnitude, nor frequency, nor volume. In our 27 year marriage we had never been sick nor satisfied our family deductible on our health insurance. We never bought a prescription plan because the most we spent was $100/year on someone in our family of 4 needing an antibiotic.
Suddenly overnight, the drug management became the focal point of our day, and rarely only once a day. Constant checking and rechecking.
David was not a good patient. Not because he was being noncompliant, although there certainly was protesting going on, and understandably so, but because he had no experience with being ill. Each administering of his drugs, if he didn’t do it himself, was a quiz on each and every pill. Why? Are you sure? Do I HAVE to take this one? What does this one do? Did you mark it off the list? Which one is this? The last question was probably the most exasperating for me. Once I took them all out of the bottles and laid them out, I didn’t remember which ones where which for cryin’ out loud! He wouldn’t take them unless he knew. It became exhausting, day after day, 3x a day.
There were the pills he was supposed to take, then there were the pills he “could” take as needed. Getting him to take the “as needed” pills became a problem, particularly the prophylactic
(taken to prevent something undesirable that was most likely to occur) ones. Those were where tremendous frustration would occur for both of us. He wouldn’t want to take pills and concoctions for constipation caused by the disease, the
morphine and the cancer meds (he had a triple whammy), until he BECAME constipated. This of course made no sense whatsoever to me, because he WOULD BE constipated. How could he not be? It was impossible. If he waited until it was a problem, then like the pain, we were chasing it down and it was brutal and would start all over again with him not wanting to take them, wait and see, as if somehow now he would no longer be constipated.
He would also take each pill, one at a time. Oh yes, let’s just prolong the agony here…
The other thing Dave would have trouble with was articulating exactly what was going on, so that I could better assess the situation and prescribe, from our now growing drug supply, what I should give him.
Dave: “My stomach hurts.”
Lori: “Oh, I’m sorry. How does it hurt?”
Dave: “It just hurts.”
Lori: “Pain or cramps?”
Dave: “Ummm, I guess pain.”
Lori: “When did it start?”
Dave: “Its been going on for a couple days now.”
Lori: “Couple of days!”
Lori: “Ok. Do you feel nauseous?”
Dave: “No. But I threw up last night.”
Lori: “Geeze Dave. When were you going to tell me that!”
And so it would go… This went on for months. I got smarter about my 20 sleuthing questions and Dave got better at describing more precisely what was occurring. It was an evolution to be sure. He was just so behind the
learning curve and it was not a learning curve he ever wanted to master. He just wanted it all to go away. The pills, the pain, the cancer…
Who can blame him.
At one point I would describe to people just how many prescriptions we had as being more than all of our 90+ year old grandparents, in their entire lifetimes, combined! (We had 6 grandparents between us who all lived over 90.) The last time we went to Little Rock, I had to pack a small suitcase just for all the prescriptions, past and present, in the event we would need them.
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Oh! the drugs the drugs!!what a learning curve that turned out to be. Like you both we have never been ill, well very rarely, before H's MM started and when I think how quickly you gather all these 'HUGE AMOUNTS to take daily, and what interacts with what and when. The best time to take etc. Suddenly your home becomes a chemist, you become adept at drug dispensing, chemo charts etc. It's a long haul, checking and rechecking. Great job here Lori. My best as always.