Take 20 and Call Me in the Morning

Norma has never been a hypochondriac.  During her middle years, she was plagued by migraine headaches.  At such times she would have gladly ingested wingnuts dipped in lard had they promised relief.  Beyond that caveat, though, she was basically pill-proof. No laxatives, antacids, antihistamines ; no elixirs, emetics or potions; no folk remedies; no alcohol.

But in 1999, she had open-heart surgeries and, as I've recounted here, she's lately been afflicted with dementia and Parkinson's.  With her defenses down, the pills rolled in like marbles until now she takes around 20 of them a day: 8 in the morning; 1 ½ in the afternoon and10 at night.  In size, they range from microscopic to the shape and bulk of a drug-smuggling submarine; in color, they hue from baby blue to apoplectic red; and in name they sound like the string section of a Polish orchestra.

Erin, our oldest daughter, picks  up the pills and sorts them into weekly trays for me.  I don't want to minimize her service by calling it the easy part, but it's really a stroll on the boardwalk compared to what I have to put up with.  Norma appears to regard swallowing as an animal act that's beneath her. And instead of accepting the taking of pills as one smooth and fluid process, she responds to each step as a separate form of torture.  To me, it's always been simple and painless. Step 1: Put pills in mouth. Step 2: Take a drink. Step 3: Swallow and wait for the applause.

Not so for Norma.  Weaned on Coke as she was, she thinks water tastes “nasty.”  Yet I feel obliged to force it on her to prevent dehydration.  This means we first have to tussle on what she'll accept to wash her pills down with.  If I prevail and the choice is water, she's a sore loser who retaliates by making gargoylish faces as soon the water touches her tongue.  

Getting the pills into her mouth presents its own array of torments.  If I depend on her to do it, she's just as likely as not to drop the pills into the water and look at me innocently, even though it's clearly a gesture of revenge. If I try to insert them into her mouth, she clenches her teeth at the last moment, thereby ensuring that one or two of them will drop down the front of her pajamas.  Searching for them would have been a sweet diversion in our friskier days, but now it comes across as geezer porn.

If I do succeed in getting the pills into her mouth and the cup of water up to her lips, it's like Charlie Brown running toward the football Lucy's holding.  I'm gonna get screwed. Instead of holding her head back to facilitate the flow of water, she tilts her head down, admitting only enough liquid to moisten the sand that must surely have accumulated there through the years.  I beg, I plead, I rage for her to “take a big drink, goddammit.” She glares at me as if I were a skin rash and then clutches at her throat as the dry pills tumble and skid down her gullet like boulders. I acknowledge her pain but  fall short of weeping for her.

I visualize French farmers force-feeding their fois gras geese through a funnel and marvel at my restraint.  Dementia or no, that chick is walking on the edge.