Pharmacological Lunacy
On Monday my mom ran out of sleeping pills. The pharmacy said that they could not refill the prescription until February 28th. On Tuesday night, she started to show signs of confusion and by Wednesday morning, she was hallucinating and delusional. I do not take sedatives because they affect my motor skills in a way that degrades my guitar playing. My mom is dependent on them.
On Wednesday morning my mom greeted me by saying,” what were you doing at six o’clock this morning walking down the street with those two men, waiting for a train ?” I told her that I did not understand the question. She assured me that she had seen me do it. (There are no trains in Thomaston, by the way.) A few minutes later she pointed at the curtain and said “Look at her!” I asked her who she wanted me to look at and she remarked that she was obviously looking at the cat, sticking her head through the curtain. (The cat was outside the house and nowhere nearby.) Mom then started “talking to the cat in the fireplace” and remarking about how I should get the cat out of the fireplace. I then pulled up a chair and nervously yet calmly explained to her that when people suddenly quit taking certain medications, the withdrawal from those medications can make them see things that are not there and that I thought that she was experiencing that. She remarked that she needed to get dressed and go to the grocery store. I insisted that I do that errand for her. I spent the rest of the day keeping her out from behind the wheel of an automobile, inventing any excuse that I could to avoid that dangerous event.
My mom then called her doctor to ask for help in getting her sleeping pills refilled. I then called the doctor on my cell phone in private to tell him about her hallucinations and delusions. He told me to call the pharmacy and to find out why the prescription was not filled and to let him know if he needed to write an emergency prescription. He eventually did at 6pm that night and the pharmacy finally filled it at 7:30 pm. I am glad that my mom’s psychobabbling did not turn paranoid and violent over the course of the day. As I drove to and from the house that day, I was listening to Second Edition by Public Image Limited. The dissonant, dismal, out of control clanging on that record expressed my feelings completely. In defense of my mom, she has never experienced recreational drug use and has no insight into the possibility of her having drug induced hallucinations. Those of us that came of age in the 1970s are more aware of that possibility and can tell ourselves that we might be imagining what we are seeing or thinking, but my mom believes at all times that what she experiences must be real. I should also mention that now that my mom has a supply of sleeping pills, she is functioning at her usual level. So to sum this up, I am going to quote Mr. Mackie from South Park who says ,
” Drugs are bad; um-kay.”
I.C.