A fistful of pills

By Joe Rector

Tuesday, I had a tooth removed. On Labor Day, the crown that covered the tooth popped out during dinner, and x-rays showed that the tooth was in bad shape to the tip of the roots. So, in about thirty minutes, the oral surgeon removed the tooth, inserted cadaver bone and sewed up my gum. In the coming weeks, I’ll have to decide what to do with that open space. One of the worst parts of growing older is dealing with medicines.

Every morning, I start the day by brushing my teeth and taking a fistful of pills. They control my blood pressure, my cholesterol, and the nagging pain that stays with me. Just to be safe, I also take a multivitamin. Those medicines change on occasion when my doctor or the cardiologist decide I need a different round of pills.

In the evenings, I’m once again brushing my teeth and taking different medications. Two are for restless leg syndrome, and one is for atrial fibrillation. Without those first pills, I’d not sleep a wink. Over the years, I’ve talked about how sometimes I walked up and down in the driveway in an effort to stop the muscle tics and cramps and jumps.

Other pills work their way in and out of my daily schedule. The condition of my teeth is the result of taking one medication that causes dry mouth. Without saliva, bacteria can eat away at my teeth. The process has been going on for some time, even though the dentist prescribed a pill to overcome the dryness. All these years I have worked to take good care of my teeth. My parents paid for braces so that my buck teeth would disappear back into my mouth. They couldn’t afford the extravagant procedure, but they struggled to help me out. Now, I take a pill for one condition, and that medicine destroys another part of my body.

I marvel at the commercials for new medications. No, the pills, creams, injections, and capsules aren’t of much interest. However, the side effects from taking the stuff are terrifying. Most of the advertised products list a bucketful of possible negative things that can happen, and most include on their lists “death.” The height of irony is to have a medication to heal that could possibly cause death.

Doctors say that many people can’t afford the medications that are prescribed. Individuals sometimes must choose between prescriptions and food. Other people simply grow tired of taking multiple medications. While those drugs keep them alive, they might offer a poor quality of life. The trade-off isn’t particularly inviting to some folks.

I miss the days when I was healthy enough to go without taking prescribed drugs. A vitamin each day was all I took. These days, I wonder how many more “pills” I must add to my regimen. Modern medicine has blessed us with longer life for which we are grateful. The rub is that that extended time comes with plenty of medicine bottles in the bathroom cabinet. I long for the day when, like Bones on “Star Trek,” doctors can treat patients with noninvasive procedures and without pills.

Until that time comes, I’ll continue to swallow the contents in those little bottles and hope that they do more good than harm.