Well, maybe it wasn’t the hard way for *me*, but it was a hard lesson nonetheless. When I was in my early 20s, my maternal grandmother (the Admiral’s wife) had a serious health event that involved hospitalization, and fear that she was at death’s door. The cause turned out to be not heart failure, not a stroke, not peripheral artery disease, not “old age”, but … pharmaceutical assault. This assault was perpetrated by her trusted family doctor, one she’d been seeing for over a decade. When we pulled open the drawer where she kept her medications and found more than 40 bottles of pills – all current scripts – we figured out pretty quickly what the disease was that we were dealing with. Stupidity. She recovered, and lived another nine years – until the last minute, she was entertaining, cooking, enjoying life, and taking only a few meds. Lesson learned: drugs interact with each other, and in an even more scary way than the recreational drugs I was familiar with had interacted on many of my friends … Fast forward 25 years, and my parents – the Admiral’s daughter and the dashing fighter jock – were battling a couple of health issues. Daddy had Parkinson’s disease, Mom had had a pituitary tumor that had been removed, but that missing pituitary gland had put her on a cocktail of endocrine management meds that had to be delicately balanced to ensure that she didn’t wind up in a permanent sinking spell. I found myself advocating for both of them at various times for equally various reasons, but my hard lesson there was this: unless someone is advocating for you, you could easily wind up dead, or crippled. I discovered that all the years I’d been researching news topics were right handy when…
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