While cleaning

 

 

While cleaning my basement, I came across a bag I had tossed aside a few years back. Inside was a stack of medications in clear packets, dates marked, others wrapped in Kleenex, stapled and with the dates clearly identified in my mom’s handwriting.

These were my mother’s six-month hoard of medication that she had pretended to take.  She would be given her pills by the nurses at her senior’s residence, as she would then proceed to distract them while she would feign having swallowed her pills.   The times when a nurse would have her eyes on her, she would take the pills in her mouth and cache them on a side of her cheek like a chipmunk, until the said nurse would leave. And then my mom would promptly spit out the medication; but instead of throwing them out, she would wrap them up meticulously in tissues, staple these Kleenexes, inscribe the date and time, and hide them with all the other pills under her bed.

I had found her hidden stash a few years back, during one of her sojourns at the hospital and I had gone to her apartment to pick up some of her clothing and slippers. I remember my reaction, even though this was not a new phenomenon. It is what I always feel when confronted with these situations with my mom. My heart starts pounding heavily, I get this pain in my diaphragm, and I see red. It is hard for me to breathe. I have stopped counting the times she stops taking her pills over the course of her / my lifetime. And every time, it makes me react. She has phases of thinking that people are trying to poison her, and that her medications are making her sick.

Of course, I confronted her about it, and for the umpteenth time, she told me it would be her last time.  I tried to remain calm. I tried to insist on the fact that her medications are what are keeping her healthy and alive, whether it be her blood thinners, her heart medications, her vitamins and her anti-psychotic pills.  But it doesn’t do much good when she is convinced that one of the nurses at the residence is evil and poisoning her, and that all the other staff are in collusion with her. It is only with careful negotiating and the collaboration of all her doctors that we can get her to stop this action of rejecting her medications. The last negotiation process included shifting the time frames to her pill routines so that she would not be confronted with the “satanic” nurse in question.

 

I don’t know why I kept them, these pills, some wrapped in Kleenexes, others still in their original plastic packages, other than to be a painful reminder of the ups and downs that she has, and that I get dragged down in and with her. Is it a reminder to myself, or served up as proof to others, of all the hardships she has gone through and inflicted on me, of the scars left on my psyche? Since I have done a lot of inner work on myself over the years, lots of therapy to heal these deep-seated wounds which have wreaked havoc on my life, it was abundantly clear that I had to let go, and toss these pills / feelings aside, to move on and to refocus.

The question is, how does one get rid of a stack of pills?

So slowly, I started opening the intact packages, removing the pills from their plastic wrappers, as well as ripping the Kleenex packets and putting all the pills in a container to dispose of at the pharmacy, as well as stacking the plastic packets to put out in the recycling bin. This was a long and laborious process. Why was I doing this? Somehow, I got enthralled by the colours and textures of the pills, even to the point of second guessing my decision to throw them out.  Can I use these for a project? And if so, what kind of project?  An installation piece, or maybe a photography series…. No. No, seriously, no. These pills must get disposed of. It’s time for me to move on.

And then I asked myself, what would others have done? Would they not just have taken the whole bag, and dumped it in the garbage, regardless of any consequences to the eco-system?  I felt that I was being as OCD as my mom.

 

My mom has not had any “episodes” (I never know what to call those times, when she goes in a downward spiral of chaos) in a couple of years.  People always ask me how she is, and I can honestly say she’s fine, she’s stable.  That’s what matters, in the end. But her normal is not other people’s norm. The thing is, when you have lifelong debilitating mental health issues, as you age, your mental state is affected.  Your day-to-day shifts, with repercussions on your thinking process.  In my mother’s case, she has developed a serious case of obsessional behaviors. They are not perceptible too much from the outside, but it affects how I and others close to her relate to her, as she hyper-focusses and fixates on the minutest of details, and there is no altering the course of her routines. And they have become her norm.

How does the OCD manifest itself? Well, there is the playing of Vivaldi’s CD ‘The Four Seasons’ over and over and over again, in this constant loop, and having the CD play even when she is not in her apartment. Or her fixation on going to the bathroom. Of her taking a sanitary napkin and having to iron out the folds with her hands for 20 minutes before installing it precisely in the centre of her underwear. Or her squirreling away religious magazines in various spots in her apartment. Or of this, or of that.  There are a thousand or so minor obsessions, when put together, make one giant headache for those around her. And they are not to be altered, as this creates major upheaval in her life, which in turn, can be the upstart of an “episode”.

So we, or I should say I, learn to deal with her behavioral glitches. I have learned to breathe, to tolerate and accept.  I have my moments, however, when the breathing and accepting is a challenge, and I am not as successful as I would like to be. I hope, that the next time I will be faced with her not taking her medications (there is always a next time), I will be able to respond differently, and I will be able to control that pressure on my diaphragm where I feel that I can’t breathe.

In the meanwhile, it is time for me to get rid of these pills, these little coloured balls of resentment, out of my house, out of my psyche and out of my memories. Time for me to bring this container of pills to the pharmacy, for them to dispose of, for them to send off to the incinerator.

 

On a side note, while I was waiting my turn at the pharmacy, the man in front of me asked the technician where his pills came from, and he was not able to get an answer.  I was intrigued by this, as it had never occurred to me to think of the provenance of medications. Having my interest piqued, I started conversing with the pharmacist, who informed me that even if a pill is made by company “X” which has its head office in country “Y”, the ingredients can come from at least 20-50 different sources and countries, which in turn makes it impossible to make an informed decision based on ethical/humanitarian grounds.  Hmmmm.  Must look further into this. Subject for another blog post, maybe.

 

And then I did it. I gave my stash of my mom’s stashed medication to the pharmacist.  And it became my time to stop hoarding things /bad memories / resentment / anger.  It is now my time to breathe.