Living Sick and Dying Young in Rich America
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/living-sick-and-dying-young-in-rich-america/282495/
We were standing at Target in an aisle wed never walked down before, looking at things we didnt understand. Pill splitters, multivitamins, supplements, and the thing we were here to buy: a long blue pill boxthe kind with seven little doors labeled S M T W T F S for each day of the week, the kind that old people cram their pills into when they have too many to remember what theyve already taken.
My husband, Joe Preston, shook his head. Do I really need this?
I grabbed it off the shelf and threw it in our basket. And when we got home, Joethen a fit and fairly spry 30-year-old man with a boss-level beardstood at the kitchen counter, dropping each of his prescriptions with a plink into the container.
I guess its true that life is full of surprises, but for the three years since Joes crippling pain was diagnosed as the result of an autoimmune disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis, our life has been full of surprises like this one. Pill boxes, trips to the emergency room, early returns from vacation. Terms like flare-up have dropped into our vocabulary. Weve sat in waiting rooms where Joe was the only person without a walker or a cane. Most of our tears have been over the fact that these arent the kind of surprises either of us thought wed be encountering at such a young age.