Medication Warning

Some people who are on medication take their pills straight from the container. Good for them. I can’t do that. I take between ten and twelve medications so I take them from weekly containers (You know, the kind that has slots for the seven days of the week). Every Wednesday I fill up my medication for the week, a tedious task but it must be done. Today I ran into a dilemma when I noticed my 2 mg Risperdal pills had an uncanny resemblance to the .5 mg Risperdal pills the pharmacy had given us. I read the descriptions on both bottles and my dad examined the pills with a magnifying glass and a flashlight. It turned out the .5 pills were identical to the 2 mg pills because they actually were 2 mg pills.

I take 2 mg of Risperdal a day. I used to get more but the side effects were really making me sick. 2 mg is enough to keep the voices at bay and me in sound mind. But if I had taken 2 mg of those “.5” pills I would have been taking 8 mg a day. Twice as high as it had been in the hospital. Probably enough to make me very sick. Possibly enough to kill me.

Okay I’ll try not to be all melodramatic about it. But these are strong drugs we are talking about. Risperdal is an antipsychotic prescribed usually for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and sometimes irritability in autism. It has caused me to gain weight, to lactate, to have a tremor so bad I couldn’t hold a paper plate at a party. Risperdal does not mess around. 

Anyway, it is possible that we screwed up somehow…although I’m not sure how. It was a closed bottle, clearly  marked by the pharmacy and the pills inside were not what it said they were. I am not about to wage war against all pharmacies because my sanity literally lies in their hands. But someone (or  maybe more than one person) were careless and the results could have been catastrophic. Thats why I encourage people who are on medication to check their pills before tossing them back. Even if they just got a bottle from CVS there is always the off chance someone fucked up. You don’t want to be a news story or a cautionary tale. Check the pills.