Round bottles of pills fill one shelf of my medicine cabinet. Only one bottle contains a rather harmless drug: a prescription pill used to fight nausea; that bottle tends to stay full for a long time. The other bottles hold stronger drugs: one for my hypothyroidism; two to reduce my anxiety and stress and allow me to sleep at night; and one, the largest one, whose contents somewhat alleviate the chronic head pain I have suffered for almost two decades due to five jaw surgeries.
The shelf embarrasses me. It reminds me that I am not a totally healthy woman who can function without external help. Saying yes to drugs weakens my self-confidence, but I have said yes for so long that the thought of discarding the drugs makes me tremble with fear.
I guess I am an addict, even though that word evokes negative images of desperate people stealing to support their habit or roaming the city’s back alleys to seek out the drug dealers upon whom they rely.
I do not look like a stereotypical addict. I shower and wear clean clothes. My speech isn’t slurred, and my arms don’t have track marks. If I take the pain medication an hour after I should have, I don’t suffer tremors—but I do experience an intense headache that reminds me it’s time to swallow my pill.
It’s ironic that I have become the woman with the shelf full of drugs. As a child, I could not swallow a pill. When I was a teenager, a close relative tried to take their life by swallowing too many drugs, instilling within me a strong fear of pills and their potentially lethal effects. I don’t like the judgmental or pitying look of the pharmacist who dispenses my prescriptions. I cringe when I fill out forms that ask me to write down all the drugs I take. The pills, with their hard-to-spell names, mock me, laughing that they have so much power over me.
But I continue to refill my prescriptions and say yes to these pills because a life without my drugs seems unimaginable to me. My pills fuel me, giving me the energy to keep moving forward, even when saying no to them—and sometimes to life itself—tantalizes me.
Ronna L. Edelstein
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania