by Jean Blasiar
At age 92 Aunt Milly was in remarkably good health.
One day Milly decided to go in for a checkup. All of her friends were going to doctors and she thought maybe she was missing something.
The checkup went just fine. Blood pressure, heart rate, stress test, EKG—all fine. They would wait on the results of the blood work. But just as Aunt Milly was leaving the doctor’s office, she limped slightly.
“What’s wrong with your leg?” the doctor asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Milly said. A little arthritis, I think.
“There’s a pill for that,” he said and wrote her a prescription.
Aunt Milly had begun on her journey to pill hell.
The pill for arthritis upset her stomach, but the doctor said, “There’s a pill for that.” And that pill caused her to be light headed when she stood, but, you guessed it, there’s a pill for that. Then nausea (probably from too many pills), digestion distress, acid reflux, and, at one point, arrhythmia, which she never had before, ever.
But now, Aunt Milly has something else she didn’t have before. She has something to talk about with her friends and she feels like she isn’t missing out any more. There was a pill for that after all…quite a few actually.
Later I attended a seminar for caretakers. One of the speakers at the seminar was a Geriatrician who opened with this amusing statement, “If you want your elderly loved ones to live to a ripe old age, keep them the hell away from doctors.”
No … seriously…