I am, very slowly, beginning the process of putting my life and the house back together. Step one is simply cleaning up after two months of purest neglect -- while the live-in aides have been doing "cleaning" in the sense of dishes and Jane's wash and such, they haven't been able to straighten anything, and the house is in a fair disarray. That's a job that really only I can do, because now I'm the only one who knows where anything goes. So as I walk through the house, there is a lot of picking something up and putting it back where it belongs -- less as a sudden whirlwind, and more as a gradual job of picking up the house and slowly shaking it until everything falls into the right slot.
One of the things in some disarray is the damned pill bottles. If you haven't cared for someone with metastatic cancer, you probably cannot imagine how many drugs are involved. (Worsened by all the ills caused by her being bedridden, which caused all sorts of knock-on ailments.) For those last two months, I had to maintain a document (a full page in Word, of 11-point type) that simply laid out the daily schedule of what needed to be given when. (Every time we needed to readmit her to the hospital, I would give the nurses a ten-minute rundown of all the meds and why they were necessary; they were generally pretty bemused.) Plus the dosages of some varied over time, resulting in more scrips, plus things that were tried and didn't work, plus the meds she *had* been on which we stopped during those final months. (Lisinopril, Metformin, Simvastatin -- she had been on lots of meds before things went bad in November and we stopped all of them, and it took a pointless refill or two of each before I realized that I needed to stop the auto-fills.)
So now the house is covered in pill bottles. There are bottles in the bedroom, the master bathroom and the main bathroom from all of her long-term prescriptions. There are bottles in her purses. There are a truly astounding number of bottles in both the family room and living room, where she spent most of her final month. (The piano downstairs was literally covered in medicines.) The hospice took away the Comfort Kit (with the morphine and haldol), but all of the more routine meds, from laxatives to steroids, are left over. All of it is now essentially junk: anything that wasn't cheap and over-the-counter is prescription, and not supposed to be reused.
So I ask my friends in the medical professions: what the heck do I *do* with all this? The hospice nurse said to simply throw it out or flush it down the toilet. The latter squicks me from an environmental perspective -- flushing random medications into the commonweal water supply seems like a bad idea on the face of it. The former seems slightly more plausible, but still leaves me wondering if there's a better approach.
Opinions? Are there correct answers here?
I know the police in Beverly do a once a year drop off for medical stuff including sharps! That was how I got rid of all my syringes.
I know some hospitals and/or doctors offices will as well.
Definitely, check around. There are places!
Another thought would be to gather them all together and ask a friend to find the proper disposal for them--you have enough to worry about already, and if there are things you can offload to friends, don't hesitate.
The MA Depart of Environmental Protection has some advice here:
http://www.mass.gov/dep/toxics/stypes/medshome.htm
http://www.mass.gov/dep/toxics/ppc.htm
http://www.mass.gov/dep/toxics/stypes/ppcpedc.htm
The best answers are probably
1. investigate whether your pharmacist knows of any kind of drug take-back program in your area, where you can drop them off. If you town has one, the pharmacist is probably aware of it.
2. Put them in the trash. Key things for this solution are to make sure they're not visible to anyone who might be trash picking and think they could get high off them, or local children or scavenger animals who might ingest them.
Hope this helps.
In response to a well-meaning suggestion above, I'd also be wary about sharing pills with anyone else -- aside from the legal issues (especially regarding DEA Schedule medications, the list of which go way beyond just the obvious narcotics), there's also sometimes subtle (but clinically important) differences between different brands of the same medications, or between genetic and Brand name versions of the same medications. As well as having to make sure there wasn't a mixup between standard release preparations vs extended release preparations, or splittable forms vs. not splittable, etc.
Before one could theoretically share pills, one would have to be *absolutely* certain the pills you were sharing were truly identical (and appropriate) to the supply the recipient already had, lest mistakenly and unintentionally giving someone a stock of what turned out to be the wrong sub-type of a particular medication and causing them medical harm. And taking on that responsibility -- and legal liability -- isn't something we would ever ask our patients to shoulder on themselves.
(Hello - a year ago, you very generously made me feel very welcome when I visited Carolingia for an evening. I very much enjoyed that evening and my conversations and dancing with you. And I am very, very sorry to hear of your loss.)
No, although the MA enviro page does say to "disguise" them and put them in the trash, you don't really want to do that. We're talking about some potentially very dangerous stuff here. One Oxycontin can kill a child. And then there are the legal ramifications: you don't want to leave even "disguised" narcotics in the trash, since it's a federal offense to "transfer" those to anyone other than (a) the patient, pursuant to a prescription or (b) a "licensed entity" pursuant to a DEA-222 form (which is how I get them). Negligently allowing someone to pick them from your trash is "transferring".
A store I previously worked at would grind up pills and mix them with coffee grounds. That's not a bad DIY choice, but it's still going into landfill.
I know you deal with one of the larger chains, one that I've briefly worked for, in fact. They have policies for everything, and I'm sure they have one for dealing with your situation. Call your friendly pharmacist and ask if they'll dispose of the stuff for you. Unclear whether they'll take back the narcs, but if they do, I wouldn't worry about the legalities in that case: no one's going to question that, and then it's their problem.
They grind and high temperature burn it all.
YMMV, of course, but it's another data point.
I just spoke with my brother-in-law, who had to do this very thing recently. The only thing he added to what has already been offered, is talk to your primary care physician. The were able to get rid of some things that way. He also said that no one solution worked for all medications.
But, could a family member do this for you? I worry that the last thing you need right now is to get that one receptionist that wants to argue with you for no good damn reason.
And --
All of my sympathy. My cousin sends her sympathy too. With some understanding -- when her mother passed, the officials distracted her father by having him catalog her meds for them. It took him over 20 minutes.
((hugs))
If you have extra nutrient drinks that you don't want, I'm pretty sure there's an organization that will put you in touch with people in need, though nobody will be willing to act as your middleman there. We gave away a case of stuff to someone we contacted that way. Meredith found that, so if you need it, I can ask her what she did to find them, or you can ping her directly.
I would think there's a better way but sheesh, I guess not. Googling turns up next to nothing. Burlington had a drug takeback day back in September but there's no indication if or when they will have another.
If you want help handling them all, let me know.