A couple of weeks ago at the grocery store I picked up one of those days-of-the-week pill keepers like your great-uncle and your drug dealer have, the long strip of plastic pockets with the days of the week on them so you can allocate your daily vitamins and pills in advance and have them all in one handy place. As opposed to losing an entire open Costco-sized bottle of Centrum for Women under the passenger seat of your car where you occasionally snatch for one when you happen to be both at a red light
and feeling particularly low on B7.
I had actually wanted to bring my grandmother's pill keeper home with me after she passed away because I thought it would be a daily sentimental reminder. I was wrong, though; according to every single person I've ever met, using your deceased grandmother's medication holder isn't "sentimental" as much as it is "breathtakingly morbid" and I was rather harshly ordered NOT to store my Claritin in the same plastic pocket where my grandmother once kept her nitroglycerin.
Fine then, I bought my own. And I felt self-conscious and rickety and like a giant hypochondriac doing it-- I mean please, right? I need a pill organizer the same way I needed a retainer made out of paperclips when I was eight. In third grade my next door neighbor and I came up with a plan to break each others' arms so we could get plaster casts. We didn't go through with it, of course, but lack of follow through isn't the problem: I HAD THE
IDEA. THAT'S the problem.
So I get home with my pill keeper and I start bustling around grabbing vitamins and shit out of the pantry, and Randy swings through the kitchen and sees me and he's all, "???" And I'm all, "!!!" And he's all, "Yeah, I'm leaving now because I can't pronounce an asterisk but don't touch my BC Headache Powder." And I was all, "YOU BETTER FEED YOUR LEECHES BEFORE YOU LEAVE."
I popped open Su through Sa and started assigning pills to days; fiber tablets, linty Centrum I scraped off the floorboards, vitamin E capsules the size of quail eggs, a bunch of Cipro for a UTI (you're welcome), vitamin C, some Anacin (don't tell Randy), assorted allergy medication, and before I knew it all seven of my plastic compartments were jammed.
JAMMED. I tried to slam Tuesday closed and a fish oil capsule exploded.
So obviously I ran out and bought a larger pill organizer. Larger. A larger one. It came with a free bottle of Geritol and a coupon for five dollars off at Cardigan World. I could store a portable breathing machine in Wednesday and still have room for an adrenaline shot on Friday. Deep inside me a little girl squinting needlessly through her mother's reading glasses rejoiced.
Randy happened to walk back in as I was repositioning everything and stopped to watch.
"Hey, are those One-A-Day
Men's? And these," he pointed, "these are for joint pain. You don't have joint pain."
"I might have joint pain."
"You should have told me," he started, and I grabbed my pharmacy and ran out of the room before he could slap a leech on me.
The whole system lasted exactly one week; I lost interest when it was time to refill everything again. Now I'm back to eating Centrum off the car floor. It's probably for the best, it was a really weird week. I mean yeah, my UTI went away and I was completely allergy-free, sure, but I also started growing hair on my back and my joints felt all soggy inside.
