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| OLD PILLS Written June 18, 2009 Fiction 1096 Words Copyright © 2009 Robert P. Herbst. All rights reserved. by Robert P. Herbst |
| During the course of the years I have been a diabetic, I have had most of my prescriptions changed by my doctor. Many times there were pills left and I was instructed to dispose of them in some safe manner. I had to give this a lot of thought. Just what is a safe way to dispose of old pills. Over the years, as I considered each possible manner of disposal, my inventory of old pills grew and grew. There was at one time an entire shelf in my bathroom devoted to hundreds of bottles of old pills I could no longer take. Day after day I wandered past this shelf thinking to myself, what was I to do with them. Naturally, with each day of procrastination, the problem grew. There were open pill bottles stacked on top of older pill bottles and these were stacked on even older pill bottles. Some of this stuff now dated back to the 1980's when I was first diagnosed diabetic. The doctor recommended simply flushing them down the toilet. This might have worked up until I saw on TV about the contamination of ground water by people flushing their unused medications down the toilet. Why a good antibiotic might just upset the entire population of digestive microbes at the sewerage disposal plant. The sewer police would follow the clean pipe back to my home and fine me for killing off the bacteria population at the sewerage plant and for the untreated contaminated waste released back into the ground water by the lack of bacteria. I had night mares about the armed Sewer Police bursting through my door, with their guns drawn, in the middle of the night to drag me off and make me pay for my indiscretion. What an awful thought. I thought of simply placing the pills in the outgoing trash, but here again there is a bacterial process at work reducing the organic garbage in to a manageable volume. I might upset the process by killing off some very necessary enzyme with my old pills. This time it was the Trash Police bursting through my door in the middle of the night with their guns drawn. I was not willing to risk this either. Still, the inventory of old and outdated medications continued to grow on my shelf. Something had to be done. Simply taking the pills out into the woods and dumping them would be considered littering and the effect on the local ecology, might be devastating. Once again the thought of armed EPA Police bursting through my door to drag me out of my home and make me clean up the mess haunted me. My son had a bonfire nearly every weekend so he could sit outside and be warmed by the flames as he drank his beer. There were usually several of his friends there with him. I thought I might sneak up to his fire and dump the outdated medications into the fire when no one was looking. Then I remembered I had a goodly supply of outdated Nitroclycerine tablets in the mix. There were probably enough Nitroclycerine tablets in the pile of outdated bottles to remove a good sized stump. Who knows what would happen if these tablets were combined with heat and all the other chemicals I’d been taking over the years. NO! Burning the pills was not the answer. There had to be another way, but I was rapidly running out of ideas. There was one way I thought might be fool proof. I would take the pills, a few at a time, and spread them out through the garden I had planted in the alley out behind my building. No one would see me doing it and I could cover the few pills I dropped each day by kicking some dirt over them. I began the very next day, taking one bottle at a time downstairs and out into the alley for disposal. It was easy enough. Then the empty bottle could be slipped into the garbage pail for pick up and no one would be the wiser. There is no harm in disposing of empty pill bottles. I was gratified to see there were no obvious adverse effect from dumping the vast variety of old medications out in the alley, in fact the plants growing out there almost seemed to look healthier than usual. The leaves on the bamboo no longer fell off as quickly and the litter on the ground began to vanish, but I was puzzled by a large number of holes leading down into the ground from the surface into the depths. I mentioned this to Yodar Hoopelhoffer, The Mount Perry town idiot as he had a real flair for trivia. Yodar seemed to think the holes were made by healthy earth worms. This made good sense as the pills were designed to keep me healthy, why would they not do the same for worms, even if they were a bit old? Quietly and in the early morning dark, I continued to dispose of the old pills. I now knew the worms were there and they were both growing in size and becoming more healthy, but I was not prepared for the noise they were starting to make. One morning after a rain storm I watched as a dead leaf fell to the ground. Instantly a huge earthworm bolted from a nearby hole in the ground, snatched the leaf and dragged the dead leaf back to the hole and down out of site. I noticed the same thing happening when I dumped out my coffee grounds and kitchen garbage each day. If there was not enough garbage thrown into the garden, the worms now snarled and fought with each other over what I threw out. The sight was positively frightening, especially when one worm took an interest in my shoe and would not let go. At long last, the inventory of old pills was gone. Now I had another problem. The worms out in the alley had become aggressive and were stalking small animals. It was only a question of time before the supply of available small animals was depleted, and the worms would seek “OTHER” larger prey. I now remain quietly in my second floor flat and toss what little garbage I have out the window. If you plan to stop by and visit, watch your feet as you approach my door. |
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