Pill Popper

I need a drawer and a box

I started my seventh decade last December when I celebrated my 60th birthday. Birthdays have never really gotten me down as I am okay with most of the things that have transpired so far. In my mid-50s, I think I began trying some supplements (like multivitamins) as they might be the magic elixir needed to fix gaps in my health. All of these supplements and pills come to us in their separate hard-to-open bottles and rainbow colors to announce to the world, “I am different than that oval light gray thing next to me”. All these shapes and sizes and alas, different recommended times to swallow. There is a moment in your life, when your home is sufficiently large, with enough drawers to comfortably accommodate your needs, that it makes sense to have a drugs drawer. That is the place where all of your daily medications reside in their bottles. I think, at one time, when homes were smaller and perhaps more efficiently designed, that place was the medicine cabinet, which doubled as a mirror in front of the vanity.

Our homes transitioned from 1 bathroom (in my childhood) to descriptions in the Parade of Homes which make you conclude that the residents are severely constipated or must have someone cleaning their bathrooms based upon the number a residence might host nowadays. While it will take me a bit to get you there, this segue about bathrooms has a point.

I remember as newlyweds, my wife and I were living in a smallish beach town called Pismo Beach, CA. Having met in the Twin Cities suburbs and having both grown up in suburbs of large cities, we were used to retail options everywhere. Pismo Beach had a number of souvenir stores, places to get shells, or proudly shout to an observer that you had visited Pismo Beach in optic pink. There were also little art galleries. Alas, if you wanted to buy groceries at a supermarket you were a bit more challenged. In one of the places we lived, we need to BYOR (bring your own refrigerator). There was a small Sears in the adjoining college town of San Luis Obispo (SLO), but choice and comparison shopping was not an option. SLO was an amazing and wonderful college town, home to Cal Poly but that is another story. I remember friends saying, if you want to go shopping, you have to go to Santa Maria, that is where all of the shopping options reside. It was a 10-15 mile drive along Highway 101 to reach the shopping mecca. As I recall there was not a Target there but there was a Mervyn’s. The Dayton Hudson Department Store Company headquartered in the Twin Cities owned a wide range of stores. Mervyns’s was one of them and it was the closest thing to home we had. The inability to feel comfortable with our retail choices led to us fatefully joining the Costco warehouse.

Oh my, I can still remember our first walk-through. We had been wisely advised to wear comfortable shoes as you would be walking on one of the larger slabs of cement outside of an airport runway. I remember seeing shoppers pushing sleds with enormous boxes of toilet paper. I remarked to my wife, if you need that much toilet paper, you should probably go to a doctor. The stores were impressive and we began to adapt to this new way of shopping. We were careful though as we lived in a two-bedroom one bath home overlooking the beach from atop Highway 101. Clearly, we were in no need of purchasing our toilet paper by the gross.

Fast forward to today and a realization that during the years of raising children in American suburbia we belonged to Sams Club and later back to Costco when they came to the Twin Cities. I genuinely enjoy trips to Costco as it engages my mind creatively. I love looking into adjacent carts and imagine what life circumstances lead to the array of goods in the cart, much less a sled. Some things come to mind during such shopping trips. When does it become reasonable to buy Neosporin in a tube sized as if it is a family-sized Crest toothpaste tube? How many abrasions does your family really face? Perhaps it is time to have a family meeting to discuss being more cautious or wear long pants a bit more often. It really requires a commitment to choose a new brand of olive oil when it is available in a 3-liter bottle. Finally, unless you are running a bed and breakfast, how is buying three dozen eggs at a time reasonable. The multi-packs of products are particularly humorous. I remember still the first time I became committed to Costco muffins and explained to my wife that muffins are an okay choice and they are a good value. In her wisdom, she advised, Mark it is the same as eating cake!

This brings me back to the drug drawer. We renovated our kitchen a while back and put in a bunch of full-travel drawers throughout. I never imagined at the time that one of those drawers would be dedicated to medications! While far from extravagant we have now had more bathrooms than people for a while as the children have left the nest. Each of those bathrooms has a vanity or additional cabinets to store all sorts of “essentials”. I think this is how we have all, unwittingly, become satellite storage warehouses for Target, SamsClub, and Costco. At some point, it became “reasonable” to remote store paper products in volumes that exceed our real requirements by a long shot. I am sure, deep in the strategy-setting meetings at these companies, making us willing accomplices to store their stuff is a part of their profit-generating plan.

With all of the drugs a diabetic, plant-based eating 60 year old might need, I succumbed to a dedicated drawer. My photo above is what it looks like today. It would have been hard to fit all of this stuff in an old-fashioned wooden drawer in a bathroom vanity but thanks to a full travel drawer glide I can manage as long as I don’t develop any other conditions. If that happens, I will simply take advantage of the innovation of that frontal lobe and start using the service from Amazon called PillPack.

Here is a song for tonight. Rock and roll give us lots of choices when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Hope to see you tomorrow.

17+

---

---