No Saints around Here: A Caregiver’s Days

Let Me Count the Ways

42 LET ME COUNT THE WAYS March 6 Ihate filling pills. Toward the end of every third week—that’s how long I can juggle our variously dated prescriptions—I notice that it is time to refill our pillboxes. Time, again. I used to measure time quite differently. That was before Parkinson ’s sank its grip so tenaciously into James. How many weeks until a long-anticipated vacation? Days until I concocted a new recipe for a little dinner party? Hours until we could contentedly close the door of our bedroom? Time has warped now. How can those three weeks have disappeared so quickly? Didn’t I do this a few days ago? Or last week? Sometimes I look in the dish cupboard, where I store the piledup , filled pillboxes, to see if maybe I’m wrong, if maybe another week’s worth of pills is sitting there, somewhere I hadn’t noticed. Perhaps I put a stack behind the plates? On the bottom shelf by the teabags? No. I could have sworn we had another week’s allotment, but we don’t. It is definitely, undeniably, time to fill the pills. In that instant, I become short-tempered. If James interrupts me when I’m counting pills, I will probably answer crossly. Sometimes he says, sweetly and half seriously, ignoring his shaky hands and foggy memory, “Do you want me to do that, Susan?” Ashamed of let me count the ways 43 myself, I roll my eyes and shake my head. If the phone rings or the doorbell buzzes, I swear, quietly but viciously. I wait for an hour when James is napping, reading, or watching television. I also need to choose an hour when I’m alert—not too late in the day, definitely not after dark. I’ve been known to forget one or another medication until the boxes have been filled, each little daily tab has been snapped into place, each box covered with a strip of masking tape to prevent accidental spills, each separate stack put away. Then I really swear. James looks alarmed, and I apologize, but I am still filled with inchoate rage as I rip off the tape and prepare to refill. Filling pills always takes an hour. Sometimes more, never less. An hour. And surely I spend hours every day doing other repetitive tasks, making beds, doing laundry, emptying wastebaskets, carrying out trash, cooking, washing and putting away dishes— whatever. Why should this one task rile me so? It seems so simple, so routine. First I dig out twelve empty pillboxes, each with seven little cavities, from a kitchen cupboard. I line them up on the dining room table. Three are labeled “james morning,” three “james evening,” three “susan morning,” and three “susan evening.” (I also take several medications and supplements.) I have labeled each box with the pills that need to go into it, different ones for morning, different ones for night. Several times in the past few years, either rushed or weary beyond carefulness, I have given one or both of us the morning meds at night or the night meds at morning. More than once, I have taken his pills, or he took mine. This is not pleasant. So I try to pay close attention to which pill goes into which box. Now I retrieve from their shelf all the bottles with nonprescription pills, the vitamins and supplements, the aspirin, the stool softener. I line them up on the table like a battalion of soldiers. These are the less troublesome pills, large and easy to handle. I pour a handful into my palm and count silently—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—as I pop each pill into its slot. let me count the ways 44 Sometimes I play a little game with myself, pretending I’ll have good luck that day if I’ve poured out the right number: seven or fourteen or twenty-one. Even with these pills, though, I can slip and make a mistake. Slippery smooth pills fall through my fingers, dump themselves twice into one slot, or rattle onto the table. I’ve learned to keep a table knife next to the boxes so I can use it to pry out pills that land in the wrong slot. When I have finished with the nonprescription pills, I stand up and stretch. Almost halfway through. Now comes the harder part: the...