Shelter Holds Your Medications Hostage

I am soon to be 51. I never thought I would make it to this number. It is darn near exhausting being 17 three times.
Each year, on Ash Wednesday, the priest has an increasingly vaster canvas on which to draw the ashen cross above my eyeballs when I present my ever-baldening head for marking. I hardly need a reminder that I came from dust, and to dust I will return. (Where is Kansas when you need them?) My feet and my knees and my hips and my back are always singing their painful refrain.
As I get older, I am adding prescriptions to my medicine cabinet at the rate of about one per year. I am up to five, and soon will have to move my stuff from the cabinet to the cedar chest or something.
Many zillions of us are taking medication – for pain, for moods, for a sagging endocrine system, for blood pressure, for fungus, for tumor shrinkage – name the part of the body, and there is an industry our there to support it, correct it, enlarge it or tenderize it.
Our homeless brethren are no different. Many come to the shelters with a bag of prescriptions. One guy who came to the Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter had emptied all of his prescriptions into a one-gallon freezer bag. He must have had 2,000 pills in there, of 20 or 30 varieties, from psychotropics to vitamins.
The question of one’s personal prescription use, as you might imagine, is a large one in the context in a homeless shelter – in a worthy one, much less the Sheridan one.
As you might guess from the tenor of previous posts, the dictator at the Sheridan shelter uses strict controls to limit access to medication. Not only is it highly unlikely that anyone else would get to your medications, you yourself could have a difficult time as well.
Imagine being accused of drug abuse because you want to take a pill an hour early so you can make it to town for a job interview. (One of the shelter staff claims near psychic powers in 'knowing' who has a drug problem. Turns out, his answer is 'everybody.') Imagine your head throbbing for two hours after you asked for access to your migraine-strength Tylenol because the staff and director are too busy.
The last time anyone kept you waiting two hours for your as-needed (PRN) pain medication, I will bet you were angry as well as hurting. Unfortunately, the shelter dictator not only limits access to a homeless person’s own medication, but she often counsels people on what they should be taking, or when they should be taking it. This direct control and major intrusion on one’s privacy and one’s condition is yet another way that the resident is lorded over and depersonalized by a megalomaniac behind a desk.
“If they don’t like it,” she says, “they can leave.”
Many have.