Cliff's brother, two hundred miles from here, found someone who wants to buy our 1988 Ford pickup and is willing to pay almost $4,000 for it. Trouble is, the pickup has to be transported to Kansas. I don't drive, remember, so Cliff can drive it there, but he didn't know how he'd get home. Between him and his brother, Don, they finally devised a couple of different plans of action, depending on what's available Sunday.
Don is a professional mechanic, and he has some projects he thought Cliff would enjoy helping on, so Cliff figures he'll stay there a couple of nights and come home Sunday afternoon. I have no desire to go sit in a house in Kansas while Cliff and his brother are playing grease-monkey, so as much as I hated to send Cliff on a four-hour drive alone, I stayed home. Those people don't even have Internet, for pete's sake! That, and Don's wife and I have very little in common.
Cliff was about sixty miles from home when I thought of his meds. I went to his bathroom and checked: sure enough, there was his weekly pill-holder. He'd forgotten all about his pills.
Now, one of my readers has cautioned me that a person should not suddenly stop taking Lipitor; her husband did that and passed away very shortly afterward.
Cliff would only be missing two nights pills, but I don't like risk-taking when it comes to my paycheck husband.
I called the local Walmart and told them my story; the lady there assured me Cliff could pick up enough of his prescription meds at any Walmart to get him through the weekend.
Sure enough, the druggist in Independence, Kansas, hunted my husband up on the computer and got everything taken care of in short order. I called Cliff and told him to stop by and pick up his two-day supply of pills. He sounded relieved.
All's well that ends well.
... when you keep track of pills in one of these things. This one holds the doctor-prescribed pills Cliff takes: a baby aspirin, Lipitor, Metropolol, and Niaspan. The Lipitor is very expensive. Cliff's cardiologist told us it is supposed to go generic this year; here's hoping! I'm not complaining, because Cliff has done remarkably well since his open-heart surgery. I only have one prescription of my own so far, a generic blood pressure pill.
There's a whole tub full of vitamins and prescriptions. We don't take any hocus-pocus stuff, just generic calcium, fish oil (which the cardiologist fully approves), a multi-vitamin, and glucosamine. As soon as the present bottle of glucosamine is gone, we're stopping it, since recent studies say it really does no good. I guess it was all in our heads, thinking our arthritis pain was lessened when we took it.
I stress to Cliff all the time that his blue pill-holder is the important one; it holds his doctor-prescribed meds. Since I'm the one who fills these things up weekly, I doubt he'd know what to do with them all. If something happened to me unexpectedly, he'd be wise to call the doctor's office and see what it is he's supposed to take.
So, young people, this is what you have to look forward to.
