It’s Sunday and that means I have a specific task to fulfil. Several in fact, but one in particular that reminds me I’m getting old. A task more tedious than the filling of the tea caddy.
There is a specific, hollow click-clack sound that signals the end of your youth. It isn’t the sound of a hip giving way or the groan of a floorboard under a middle-aged gait. No, it is the rhythmic, plastic rattle of the seven-day pill organiser. The “Tupperware of Doom” being shaken like a sad, pharmaceutical precision instrument.
For years, I looked at those multi-coloured plastic boxes in the chemist’s aisle with the same detached pity I reserved for people who buy beige trousers from Marks & Spencer or those who enjoy birdwatching. Or pottering around in the garden. They were for the “old ‘uns.” For the people who had given up on spontaneous living and replaced it with a rigid, colour-coded schedule of chemical maintenance.
Then, suddenly, the GP starts talking. First, it’s a statin—“just for insurance.” Then something for the blood pressure because the modern world is a stress-cooker. Throw in a Vitamin D because we live in a country where the sun is a mythological concept, and a Glucosamine tablet the size of a surfboard to stop the knees from sounding like a bowl of Rice Krispies.
Suddenly, you aren’t a person anymore; you’re a chemistry experiment.
There is a peculiar kind of psychological defeat in sitting down on a Sunday evening to “load the pill magazine.” You feel like a weary soldier preparing for a long, dull campaign. Monday is blue. Tuesday is green. By Wednesday, you’re wondering if you’ve actually taken the little white round one or the slightly larger white round one. I forgot the whole lot the other day. I know I did because the pill organiser rattled when it shouldn’t have.
Most people are, fundamentally, afraid of death. We spend our lives buying things to make ourselves feel a little bit better. Some people pay extraordinary fees to have their remains frozen in liquid nitrogen, hoping to be revived in a future where we’ve solved the pesky problem of mortality. But for the rest of us, the “feeling” we buy is much humbler. We buy the plastic box. We buy the “beep” on the smartphone at 6:00 AM. We buy the hope that if we just keep swallowing the chalky little miracles, we might just keep the wheels from falling off for another week.
It’s a far cry from the “extraordinary” measures of the Arizona cryogenics labs. There’s no liquid nitrogen here, just a glass of lukewarm water and a stubborn refusal to admit that the “maintenance” light on our biological dashboard has been flashing for a decade.
We aren’t freezing our heads; we’re just trying to remember to take the Omega-3. But in that little plastic rattle, there is a strange sort of comfort. It’s the sound of a plan. It’s the sound of staying in the game. And if that means sounding like a loose bag of Lego every time I walk to the shops, then so be it.
At least I know what day it is. It’s Sunday and time to refill the pill organiser.