Big pharma, cold shwarma

I never really thought about the industry much until I entered the world of ‘Little Pharma.'

By PHILIP GOLD
Pills medicine medication treatment (photo credit: Srdjan Zivulovic / Reuters)
Pills medicine medication treatment
(photo credit: Srdjan Zivulovic / Reuters)
‘Big Pharma.” The predatory, rapacious, quasi-criminal, multinational drug companies that people love to hate – until one of their products saves your life, or dulls your pain, or heals some torment, or does the same for someone you care about. In truth, Big Pharma has always seemed to me more the victim of its own successes than institutionally evil. Also, in truth, I never really thought about it much until I entered the world of “Little Pharma.” As in, suddenly finding myself with seven or eight drugs, sometimes more, sloshing about within. First in America, then here.
From 1973 to 2009, except for some meds related to almost losing an eye after watching televangelist Jimmy Swaggart on TV one night (it’s a long story), I used no prescription drugs. Indeed, in 1973, I even turned one down. I was in the Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital, giving the Marines the opportunity to remove a screw in my ankle that they’d implanted a couple of years before. I was settling into my pre-op bed when a corpsman, or Navy medic, approached.
“Here’s your Valium.”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“I know. The surgeon prescribes it for everybody.”
“Thanks, but take it away.”
This went on every six hours for three days, until I finally asked the doc why he’d ordered it.
“We don’t have television in the rooms,” he replied serenely, “and the patients appreciate it.”
Thirty-six years later, I had my first prealiya physical. High blood pressure. High cholesterol. Overweight. Prescriptions galore. So I went to the pharmacy.
Immediately, I noticed a large sign. “To ensure patient privacy, Federal Law requires you to stand behind the line on the floor while waiting.”
Magnificent, thought I. Here’s our government, running two wars and benevolently hegemonizing the planet, and they still have time to tell us how to stand in line.
A year later, I found myself wishing that the Knesset might do the same. Granted, in Israel, standing in line is a contact sport.
And there’s always someone who limps in, piteously explains that he or she can’t stand in line/must be served now, goes next, then leaves doing cartwheels.
And this business of everybody wrenching their necks to check out each other’s prescriptions. Older men seem to be scanned with exceptional avidity. What are they looking for? Viagra? I’d assumed that Israel had neither the money nor the need for such, until I found myself in a small clinic in Beersheba that had a wall clock with “Viagra” inscribed on the face.
Oh, well. As long as it contributes to the up-building of the state.
The blood pressure and cholesterol got fixed in America. I also spent a couple of days trying a certain popular medication to lessen my obsessivecompulsive proclivities. All it did was turn me into a psychotic housewife. Still, we had the cleanest, tidiest house in the neighborhood until my wife made me give it up because I was putting too much starch in her spandex.
Then I came to Israel, got diagnosed with cancer, developed a nasty hernia that couldn’t be repaired until after chemo, plus two vertebrae I somehow cracked – perhaps in ulpan, trying to read right-toleft.
And the descent into Little Pharma began.
The pain pills and muscle relaxers kept me going. So did a certain famous sleeping pill. Once, I went for a refill a bit too early for the computer.
“Did you take two of these at night in America?” the pharmacist asked sternly.
“Yes,” said I, not having the Hebrew to explain otherwise.
“In Israel, you take only one.”
“Why? Is it easier to get to sleep here?” Then there were the chemo drugs, the drugs to ease the side effects, the steroids, the prophylactic antibiotics. It all began to accumulate. Heavily. Then, after the back healed somewhat and the hernia got fixed and the second ChemoFest ended, I decided that, except for the antibiotics and the aspirin, I had to get off it. True, I’d be using this stuff periodically for the rest of my life. But I wasn’t going to become a prescription junkie.
So I went “cold shwarma.”
Midway through the third sleepless night, after hours of pacing, I began to wonder if I was having some sort of psychotic episode. I was scared. And I faced a choice. I could awaken my wife, my soul mate, my beloved, and we could share the crisis. Or I could play computer solitaire.
I made the right decision.
Lessons to be learned from all this: three. First, cold shwarma’s not a good idea. Second, computer solitaire can be a spiritual experience. And third, despite all the furor about Big Pharma, pandemic overprescribing, the medicalization of unhappiness, the doping of society – you’re still responsible for you.
The writer, an American oleh, is author of Yom Kippur Party Goods (John Hunt/O Books, 2011). His novel of Israel and America, Ha’Kodem, is in the works.