No Poster Girl

My dad died suddenly last summer, five days before my birthday. 

I received a lot of kind expressions of sympathy, and to some people who remarked on the suddenness of his death, I said, “It’s okay; I’ve really been getting ready for it nearly my entire life.” It was long real to me in a way one’s father’s death isn’t for most people.

In 1978, when I was three years old, the day my mom learned she was pregnant with my brother, my father was diagnosed with stage 4B Hodgkin’s. They said they’d treat him, but they wouldn’t give him odds; the odds were too bad. He had two further occurrences and endured a total of twenty-one rounds of MOPP chemo before going into remission for good in 1982. 

When I set the table back then, with the practicality of a child who has known nothing but a difficult situation, I gave him the brown placemat because he threw up a lot. When I got the (infrequent) chance to choose candy, I picked Good & Plenty so I could pretend I was taking pills, like Daddy. 

When he was first diagnosed with Hodgkin’s, he had a hospital roommate, another young father with the same diagnosis, same stage, with three children. That man died within a few months. I have thought of those kids countless times over the course of my life, always aware that they were out there in the world having a very different experience than my brother and I were, and hoping they were okay.

My dad’s hair was completely silver by his early 40s. I don’t actually know it was the years of stress the cancer had caused but it’s always seemed plausible. 

Sometime after his last bout, when I was still a child, I asked him if he would die someday. 

Content warning: TMI, mental health.

Several friends have asked me whether I can be vaccinated and I’ve answered them individually. I’ve even written about it a couple times and stopped short of hitting the post button because the potential for comments on the topic has felt too stressful. But I’ve gotten the query enough times now that I guess I should put this out more widely.

When I became Dr. Cheney’s patient in 2009 and he learned that my descent into ME had been triggered by my first-ever flu shot, he told me that I should not be vaccinated again unless it could not be avoided.

I’m still undecided about whether this can be avoided.

That awful moment where you lift the new bottle, and the sound of the tablets shifting says “this is the wrong brand.”

The manufacturer discontinued the formulation of metoprolol ER I’ve taken for years, and I found that the first replacement brand I tried, the one my local pharmacy usually stocks, didn’t agree with me. 

The last time I talked to them about it, they’d ordered a second for me to try, and I think where we’d left it was that I was going to call back if it didn’t work so I could try the one other formulation available. The second one did work, and because they gave me that one three months running, I wrongly presumed that they’d continue. Because of course there’s more than one person there, I should have called back to confirm and set that one in stone. That was my mistake, not theirs.

I don’t know if it’s against the law everywhere – I can certainly imagine why it would be – but in the U.S. state where I live, it’s against the law for pharmacies to take a bottle of pills back when this happens. You have to check and catch it *before* they turn it over to whoever is picking it up. And if you don’t and you want it replaced, you have to pay out of pocket to replace it if you want it before the date your insurance will pay for another refill.

I called them and asked them to please order a bottle of “second formulation” to replace it with and to mark in my script for it to fill it with that brand going forward. The tech said “Uh, there are no more characters left in this little box,” the one where they’ve noted all my other brand specifications. She had to find another spot in the record where it’d fit. 

I don’t know if I still do, but for a long time I had My Very Own Shelf at the pharmacy for this reason, and if it’s still there, Second Formulation will get to slide in with all the others and say, “You too?” 

Anyway, write today off, between the stress of fixing this on the phone and my body’s unhappiness with being thrown off balance.