“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare’s Jaques proclaims in As You Like It, each of us playing a series of roles, our “acts being seven ages.” It was a synopsis of life that seemed comprehensive to me until recently, when I found myself again apportioning my pills for the coming week. Surely the Bard would have acknowledged this phase of life. Surely the Age of Prescriptions deserves an act of its own in the “strange eventful history” of our lives.
Though the costuming for this role may vary, we all probably rely on the crucial prop of a weekly pill organizer. And most of us likely make do with the cheap plastic kind, each lid marked with a capital letter to denote each weekday, lids whose (again, cheap and plastic) hinges crack off all too soon, albeit at different rates. Thus Tuesday’s lid has been repeatedly Scotch-taped by the time Saturday’s gives out. When Thursday’s goes, I think about springing for a new pill organizer, one fancier, made of sterner stuff. But I wind up getting the same sort as before, whose lids will wear out according to a wholly different yet equally inexplicable pattern.
Like an actor’s cues, the medications themselves require delicate timing. Which ones to take on an empty stomach and which with a meal? Which may cause drowsiness or indigestion? We memorize their brand and generic names, their dosages and refill dates like lines of dialogue, rehearsed again before each doctor’s appointment. Even a trip to the pharmacy can feel like an audition, as if proving ourselves worthy of Something-itol and Whatever-amine, crossing our fingers against any insurance mix-up this time. No wonder we feel such relief afterwards, fairly dancing as we shake our 90-day supplies like pharmaceutical maracas, coming home to dole out those pills into their respective daily compartments before snapping closed those plastic lids—regardless of their condition—our medicinal future sealed, we hope, for another week.
How many times playing out this ritual, this little drama before it earns a place among those ages Shakespeare described, added to that famous speech? It belongs as much as the wise judge full of adages or the “lean and slippered pantaloon.” Call it the Age of Pills, softly rattling until, as Jaques himself might say, we’re past needing them altogether, sans side-effects, sans co-payments, sans everything.
James Scruton reads and writes between trips to the pharmacy. He still believes laughter may be the best medicine.
