Little Boxes

I was just watching a movie in which a person was dying of cancer.  And a big part of how they indicated this was that the poor man was laying in bed, and on the side table next two him were four portentous prescription bottles of pills.  They took up quite a bit of space on that little table, and were in sharp focus, so you could tell the guy was really, really sick.

Um.

I'm laying in bed at the moment, and snuggled up next to me is a large plastic shoebox, filled to the top with bottles and boxes of various medications.  On the chair next to the bed are two more shoeboxes, each about half full of bottles and boxes of various pills, powders, liquids, creams, and random medical equipment.  Also there is a large brown paper grocery bag, full of boxes of pre-filled syringes.

The regular stuff is, of course, in the medicine cabinet.  And then there's wherever it is that my husband is storing the medications for his heart, thyroid, diabetes, and eyes.

Before I had cancer, I took the occasional allergy pill, and sometimes I took some ibuprofen for cramps.  That was about it.  Well, I used deodorant and toothpaste, too.  But I wasn't big on medications; not because of a particular moral objection, but because they just don't work that well for me, and they always cause nasty side effects.  So I stayed away from them as much as possible.

Cancer changes all that.  And the ironic thing is that most of the meds you end up with are not treatments for the cancer... nope, most of it is stuff you take to try to deal with the treatments for the cancer, and what you take to try to deal with the stuff you take to try to deal with the treatments for the cancer.  And it just keeps adding up, a huge avalanche of little bottles and boxes that bury you (in nearly every sense of 'bury' you can think of, including the final and permanent state).

So I suppose it's a good thing that I'm not a Hollywood Director.  Because if I were, there wouldn't be a touching scene of reunion where the doting relative runs into a sunlit room and embraces her dying loved one, then sits on the side of the bed, holding hands and exchanging confidences.  Nope.  In my movie, the doting relative runs into a dimly lit room and frantically digs through mountains of plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, from which can dimly be heard muffled requests for help in finding the Really Good Laxative...

... and Cut.