Marriage, Medicare, and the Great Pill Divide

After forty‑plus years of marriage, my husband and I have learned to live with our differences: he ignores symptoms, and I treat mine like breaking news.

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My husband and I have differing views on medicating ourselves.

His philosophy: I will only take something if I get hit by a truck the size of Kansas.

My philosophy: I think I’m going to get a headache tomorrow. I’m taking a pill today.

I should have known. Forty-some years ago, before we were married, he told me that after he severely injured his back while lugging a hot-water tank out of the basement, his ex-wife insisted he take a Midol.

Midol is for “relief of menstrual symptoms,” but it caused him to sleep for three days and cured his back.

Back then, I swallowed Midol like candy and still spent five days of each month in the fetal position, wide awake.

Now we are both in our Medicare years, and pill-taking is just a fact of everyday life. Well, for one of us.

It’s not that I don’t have real “conditions” that warrant some prescription. There’s my atrial fibrillation, high cholesterol, and, most prominently, the pharmaceutical companies’ favorite: my mood swings. I swear one day I will get a letter and fruit basket from Eli Lilly saying, “Dearest Judi: We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

I think my husband gets his aversion to medication from his late mother. She’d only take antidepressants when she felt like it, as if they were breath mints. Her depression never quite lifted.

My husband’s conclusion: “She takes antidepressants, and they don’t do any good.” From that, he decided that no medications do any good.

I said, “But I take antidepressants, and I take them the correct way.”

He said, “I rest my case.”

I won’t say that he never had an appreciation for medications. After he broke his hip and needed surgery, he did not fight the anesthesiologist. And occasionally he does admit to having pain, as he did the other day when he said, “No, I cannot lift that (torn, ratty old) chair and bring it to Goodwill because my back hurts like hell, and besides it’s a perfectly good piece of furniture.”

Pretty much, though, he ignores indicators of illness while I am an Internet symptom checker. In fact, when the skin doctor noticed I had sprouted some odd-looking objects on my body (odder than usual), he said I’d have to wait a week for the results. Of course, the first thing I did was Google the “stranger-than-standard-bodily-things.”

“I might have bubonic plague,” I yelled to my husband from my basement office.

“You probably don’t,” he yelled back.

Another difference between my husband and me is that if he gets hurt, he wants to suffer in silence. Well, except for the hip, which I heard plenty about.

A few weeks ago, we were about to leave for a Seder, and he put our not-kosher-for-Passover cake in the trunk. Being that he’s not Jewish and the cake wasn’t either, apparently from somewhere above came the declaration, “You will suffer!”

The trunk lid fell on his head. Hard.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked as he walked around swearing a blue streak.

“Go away,” he said.

I went back inside. I took a pill. It helped.

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