Over The Counter Medication

Moving a handicapped individual into a group home is a stress-laden experience for all parties involved. Beatrice Dungstone's unpopular move into her new communal digs produced ripe stressors. As a registered nurse and I stood in the quaint country style kitchen of Beatrice’s new home matching volumes of medication vials to physician prescriptions, our criss-crossing hands looked like a giant game of medicinal concentration as we laid the scripts on top of each bottle to signal a match. As group home staff gathered around the kitchen table, Beatrice saw the control in her life slipping away.

Ingloriously, I started to separate the many over the counter medications from the generic flock of anti-psychotic and anti-convulsant medications. Beatrice looked on with displeasure that rooted in her scowl. She didn’t want anyone overseeing her medications but, while living on her own terms, her standards produced a stockpile of over 1000 pills of an anti-convulsant medication alone, some of which dated back two years and the medicine bottles were still stapled inside white pharmacy bags. Consequently, pill counting group home staff would be responsible for Beatrice's medication administration whether she liked the dependency or not.

Before the array of medicine made sense to all parties involved, Beatrice grabbed my wrist to gain my attention. “Don’t do that, Joe. Don’t separate my pills like that.”

“Let go.” I requested from my kitchen seat. “I need to put aside your over-the-counter medication.”

Beatrice vented, “You big shot people are making such a fuss about when and where I have to take my medication. I lived alone for years without a problem." She raised her walking cane like a weapon. "I can pill pop faster than you can pill count. If you want me to take them pills over-the-counter, I will. I’ll take them over the sink or at the kitchen table for that matter. I don’t care where you make me take them pills.”