Saturday, December 08, 2007
Old Medications
I did a difficult thing today. I dealt with all of Jane's old medications.
I had tried to pawn this job off. I had called the pharmacies we'd used; I'd called UCSF; I asked the hospice. Nobody could or would help, so the task fell to me. You can't dump old prescriptions down the toilet anymore. Instead, I went to Starbucks and got a big bag of old coffee grounds. I put a few cupsful in a large ziploc bag, then started dumping in the pills from their bottles.
Each bottle brought back memories, many of them painful. Some of these drugs were much in the news, either for their astronomical cost or their potential ferocious side effects: Gleevec, Thalidomide, Accutane. Others were old and lifesaving friends: Temozolomide, Gabapentin. Still others were drugs we preferred not to acknowledge: kytril, zofran, and the hated dexamethasone. (The first two are antiemetics taken with oral chemotherapy, and the third is a corticosteroid which many brain tumor patients take but which almost everybody loathes for a variety of reasons.) Some were cute and colorful, like the pink-and-purple capsules of hydroxyurea which Jane took while we traveled in France in the summer of 2006. I tossed in some of Delta's and Fang's out-of-date prescriptions, too.
Only a couple of the drugs -- Ativan and Morphine -- would hold any recreational value.
Once all of the pills were in the coffee grounds, I poured on the liquid meds. Most were digestive aids from the months and months of hospice care, but they included Rapamycin -- another vastly expensive medicine -- which was the next-to-last chemo she tried.
Eventually I tossed in the bottles themselves, sealed the ziploc, and put the whole mess in another garbage bag. The goal in doing all of this is to make the drugs as unappealing as possible should anybody fish them out of the trash. I certainly succeeded in doing this.
Now it's done, and I should be pleased that I've completed a long-postponed task. Instead, I feel rotten. It's almost criminally cruel that survivors are stuck doing jobs like this.
I had tried to pawn this job off. I had called the pharmacies we'd used; I'd called UCSF; I asked the hospice. Nobody could or would help, so the task fell to me. You can't dump old prescriptions down the toilet anymore. Instead, I went to Starbucks and got a big bag of old coffee grounds. I put a few cupsful in a large ziploc bag, then started dumping in the pills from their bottles.
Each bottle brought back memories, many of them painful. Some of these drugs were much in the news, either for their astronomical cost or their potential ferocious side effects: Gleevec, Thalidomide, Accutane. Others were old and lifesaving friends: Temozolomide, Gabapentin. Still others were drugs we preferred not to acknowledge: kytril, zofran, and the hated dexamethasone. (The first two are antiemetics taken with oral chemotherapy, and the third is a corticosteroid which many brain tumor patients take but which almost everybody loathes for a variety of reasons.) Some were cute and colorful, like the pink-and-purple capsules of hydroxyurea which Jane took while we traveled in France in the summer of 2006. I tossed in some of Delta's and Fang's out-of-date prescriptions, too.
Only a couple of the drugs -- Ativan and Morphine -- would hold any recreational value.
Once all of the pills were in the coffee grounds, I poured on the liquid meds. Most were digestive aids from the months and months of hospice care, but they included Rapamycin -- another vastly expensive medicine -- which was the next-to-last chemo she tried.
Eventually I tossed in the bottles themselves, sealed the ziploc, and put the whole mess in another garbage bag. The goal in doing all of this is to make the drugs as unappealing as possible should anybody fish them out of the trash. I certainly succeeded in doing this.
Now it's done, and I should be pleased that I've completed a long-postponed task. Instead, I feel rotten. It's almost criminally cruel that survivors are stuck doing jobs like this.
Labels: brain tumor, hospice, Jane
# posted by F.S. @ 2:08 PM 
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How heartbreaking a task it must've been. A shame that no one else was willing to do it for you. At least now it's over. Grief is the most difficult of all the emotions. I feel for you, Fred.
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