Frustrations of Age

Oh, the joys of aging! Just now I am frustrated by the 3-pinhead-size pills my pharmacy dispenses for one of my prescriptions. And it’s not the pharmacy’s fault, but rather the unbelievable lack of sensitivity of manufacturers to what older adults need, if we are to continue to lead more or less independent lives at home.

For me, one of the weekly tasks that tries my patience most is filling my pillboxes. Now you may well ask: how could something that simple cause the anguish it does, week after week?

Here’s the scoop: as our bodies age, the sensitivity of some of our nerves diminishes. We can develop “neuropathy” in hands and feet, making it difficult to know where our feet are heading sometimes, impossible to notice when we get a cut or bruise, or even unable to pick up small things with fingertips that used to work perfectly.

Manipulating a sewing needle by hand becomes a challenge; pedicures become almost dangerous for us to try to do ourselves; and never mind trying to use our fingertips to pluck a hair off a shirt collar, much less try to pick up a tiny pill when it goes awry as we are filling the week-long daily doses pillbox.

Why would any manufacturer of medications not do better research to figure out the best way to keep elderly folks able to dispense their own medications when they are perfectly aware of what is needed to do so? There is nothing wrong with my mind: well, nothing that would stop me from dispensing my own medications for now, anyway. But there is something wrong with a pharmaceutical manufacturer that makes a pill so tiny it’s hard to grasp securely in the tips of one’s fingers, difficult to drop one at a time into adjoining squares in a pillbox, and impossible to pick up when it falls onto the counter (much less the floor) as the pill bottle gets knocked over accidentally.

As my medication in question is largely taken only by older folks with my particular (very common) malady, it ought to be a “no-brainer” that the manufacturer would tailor the pill’s physical properties to our life-stage needs, right? After all, they make medications in liquid form for babies and young children: why can’t they make this pill a little bigger, so it’s easier for us to handle? I know that would require extra “filler” to make the pill a bit larger for this lowest dose I am taking, but the medication in question is extremely inexpensive anyway, so I doubt a bit more “filler” would break the bank of any of us who need to take it.

I can almost guarantee you that the size is not intended to force us into nursing homes. If that were true, we’d have to be doing more to increase the ease of admission to one of those. Right now, staffing problems are so great at many of these facilities that they cannot accept more patients, even when they have rooms free for patients. (We do know, after all, where some of those 1.3 million deported aliens since January 20 were working.)

And where is the Food and DrugAdministration in all of this? Well, frankly it does not appear to care much about the elderly, in my humble opinion. While the agency regulates the “safety, efficacy, and security” of our food and medications, convenience or ease of use is not one the agency’s mandates, and woe is me (along with thousands if not millions or other elderly folks who are in the same boat).

So what to do? I have begged the pharmacy to order this medication (the generic form) from a different company, and sometimes I get lucky (one out of three times) and can take home a version that is about three times the size of this minute version, but it’s not the best situation to see the supply dwindling in the later days of my three-month supply, and know that I am playing a “senior’s version” of Russian roulette when I re-order.

What can anyone do to solve life’s problems? My dad would have said, “All you have to do is quit breathing, and all your problems are over.” Yep, thanks for that reminder, Dad, that my worries are trivial, compared to what others endure. . . And I am so thankful that my other meds all come in larger sizes.