Where are those pills?

Written By Neil Offen

      Ever since the heart attack, I have been carrying around with me a small metal canister filled with nitroglycerin tablets. It’s in case I have an episode of angina. The canister is attached to my keychain, and it is always with me, although I’ve never used the nitro for angina and, hopefully, never will have to.
      But while traveling, I don’t take my keys and thus there’s no attached canister. So I bring another canister, a loose one dropped into my pocket, to have the nitro with me at all times.
      And I did, on this trip, have it with me until the morning at the new hotel in the new town where I couldn’t find the new canister. I looked everywhere – in all my pockets, in the backpack, in the suitcase, on the floor of the hotel room, in all the drawers of the hotel room. No canister.
      Someone I know has carried around tablets of nitroglycerin for more than 40 years – and never used a single one. I didn’t expect to use it either, but I wanted the assurance of knowing it was with me.
      So, in the pouring rain, we walked down the flooding streets to the nearest pharmacy. We asked first, of course, if the pharmacist spoke English.Thankfully, she did.
      I explained that I always carried nitroglycerin, but had lost mine and could I get it from the pharmacy? It is supposed to be only by prescription and I was imagining having to call or email or text my cardiologist to get authorization. And with the time difference that would’ve been particularly difficult.
      The pharmacist asked what kind of nitro I used. Since I had never used it, I wasn’t certain. She asked what dosage I used, but since I had never used it, I didn’t know that either.
      After a bit of conversation, we figured out that I needed the lowest dosage, sublingual pills. The kind you put under your tongue and let melt.
      The pharmacist didn’t wait for a prescription authorization. She went and got the box of nitro. Fifty pills that will last me forever.
      That will be €1.45 she said. A little less than two dollars.
      There were no co-pays. There were no authorizations needed. There was no checking to see if my drug was in the formulary or what tier it was. We walked out of the pharmacy relieved, appreciative, and thinking how much better, how much more humane, how much more helpful other countries’ health systems are than ours. 

Neil Offen

Neil Offen, one of the editors of this site, is the author of Building a Better Boomer, a hilarious guide to how baby boomers can better see, hear, exercise, eat, sleep and retire better. He has been a humor columnist for four decades and on two continents. A longtime journalist, he’s also been a sports reporter, a newspaper and magazine editor, a radio newsman, written a nationally syndicated funny comic strip and been published in a variety of formats, including pen, crayon, chalk and, once, under duress, his wife’s eyebrow pencil. The author or co-author of more than a dozen books, he is, as well, the man behind several critically acclaimed supermarket shopping lists. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Next

Direct from Trump’s “Disaster”