Drug Town

At first I didn’t know what to say to that lady I met in the back of Drug Town while waiting for my friend get her blood pressure measured. The lady looked half-dead, but told me she is not eligible for disability because she is still able to stand. I doubted she could stand for more than five minutes. She told me she is over 62 and has had aneurisms and blot clots and trouble breathing, yet they are not going to hand over the checks until the hospital in Iowa City puts the pressure on. You have to be nuts to get government money these days. If you slash your wrists you can get it more quickly. They want you to put a gun to your head first, and then they will talk to you about sending the checks.

She and I talked while my friend had her arm in the cuff, and as I listened to this lady's story, I could hear my inner voice trembling, “She’s some form of a future me. She is every woman of a certain age with support-hose straining to hold in her varicose veins, sitting on a chair in the back of a drugstore waiting for them to fill four prescriptions she cannot afford.” Suddenly the twinges of discomfort I get in my lower back became a crippling form of arthritis and I was wheelchair bound. I am her a few years or a stroke away. I say, “I know what you are feeling. They always make you wait—they try to run you down with bureaucracy so you will wither up and blow away and forget your brain is about to burst.”

As this lady tells me her story, I want to scream. I imagine thousands of older women with aneurisms who can no longer stand for their eight hour shifts at Wal-Mart because their backs are breaking and the veins in their legs are popping. I imagine a sea of them sitting at kitchen tables long into the night, filling out forms for disability, knowing their efforts are futile, and certain they will be denied assistance because they can still manage to stand. I imagine them giving up, too tired to try, as they finish Diet Cokes head toward sofas where they curl up in fetal positions with TVs on until the pictures turns to fuzz. I imagine they refuse to get up for any reason other than to use the bathroom for the most basic of necessities, or to quickly grab some Fritos from a peeling kitchen cupboard before resuming fetal positions on warn and stained sofas. They lay with cats whose litter boxes are full, but who devotedly curl next to them as they refuse to open mail or answer the occasional ring of their phones.

And, I wonder, is it the pop tarts, the insidious infiltration on a massive scale of sugar and salt laden foods that causes popping veins and aneurisms? If they had only juiced and eaten organic, like good people should, and jogged and enrolled in Pilates classes, would they now be curled up on sofas watching television screens turn fuzzy? Will I, who do not practice Pilates, be punished, forced to join this mass movement of sofa-ridden aged women? Will I, with a rarely used juicer sitting on my counter and several pounds of organic apples sitting uneaten in my refrigerator, succumb to popping veins? Is being too lazy to cut up a few apples and carrots and put them in a juicer on a regular basis (especially when I possess these resources), grounds for that prison sentence called aging?

When my friend checks the results of her blood pressure, she looks relieved. Her pressure is lower than it was a few days ago when it was so alarmingly high it threatened to burst the vessels in her eyes causing an inconvenient state of blindness. We had been to the University of Iowa Hospitals earlier in the week, and the specialist told her that her vision was not permanently impaired and would improve if she increased the dosage of the dugs she was taking. She had waited to see the doctor because she was in-between insurance having just left a job and started as an independent contractor. Thank god, I said, now you won’t go blind. My friend walked to the counter and picked up her new prescription. I noticed her new JJill tee shirt looked tight around her midriff and tummy. I remembered when we were both more slender.

“Do we need anything while we are here?” I ask. After all, they do have a small health food section. “How about some Ben and Jerry’s fhish?” she answers. “Yeah,” I say, “We deserve it.”