The Lifted Cup
I thought I had remembered everything, on every front, but in particular on the medical front. Band-Aids and bug spray, hand sanitizer and Alka-Seltzer, antibiotic and cortisone creams, rapid seal wound closure. I had packed all my husband’s regular medications and supplements, sorted neatly –some might say anally—into plastic baggies labelled AM and PM. I had a list of these medications in case, God forbid, we had to visit a doctor’s office or emergency room during our vacation. I had the relevant paperwork in my travel folder: health care directives, proxies, and powers of attorney, in case, double God forbid, either I or my husband had to make a healthcare decision for the other. I had my supplements and the meds I take to get rid of a headache, but what I forgot to grab before leaving the house, what I forgot to tuck into my purse –because I don’t trust it to carry on luggage or even luggage sitting in the trunk of a car– was the bottle of pills that holds the meds I take to keep my headaches off, the pills I have taken four times a day, every five hours, for the last fifteen years.
When did I realize I hadn’t brought this critical medication? A few minutes after 5 pm, an hour after our arrival at the Air BnB my husband and I had rented on Piseco Lake in Upstate New York. We were sitting on the Adirondack chairs in the yard watching three loons watching us from the deck of the wooden float fifty yards off our beach. The lake was like glass. Panther Mountain on the opposite shore stretched peacefully against an early evening sky, and that peculiar quality of forest-sifted silence embraced us. Then one of the loons rose to flap its wings, and I suddenly realized: my every-five-hour pills were sitting on the shelf in our kitchen three-and-a-half hours away.
I texted our Air BnB host who sympathetically texted back the two nearest pharmacies, one, 45 minutes away in Barneveld, and the other, 55 minutes to the south in Gloversville. I got up and went into the house, opened my laptop, and googled both places. Barneveld looked like the better bet. It was closer, and it wouldn’t be the same way we’d driven only the day before.
Pushing back my panic with information, I wrote down the pharmacy address, the phone number, and the ID. I googled the town of Barneveld. It was on the road to Rome (New York). Population 240, named for a Dutch statesman of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It had a restaurant with a great name, The Lifted Cup Café, run by a local man who’d left to serve as a cook on Navy submarines and returned after his service to open a business. We could go there after I picked up my pills. Visions of coffee, convivial conversations, and calories went part way toward cheering me.
After all, it could be worse, I told myself. It could be the weekend. All I needed to do was get up the next morning, call my doctor, and ask them to send a tide-me-over prescription.
The Air BnB we’d rented was a family home. It was warm and comfortable with wooden floors, deep leather sofas, and a soul-soothing vista of lake, mountain, and sky. The mattress on our king-size bed was just the right combination of soft and firm. I’d like to say I enjoyed a good night’s sleep on it, but I spent most of that first night lying awake wondering if I should take the last remaining pill –the pill I had packed for the road– or save it for the next day if and when I started to feel ill.
I knew that the prudent thing to do was to save it, that I didn’t know how long it might take to get more, but sleep wouldn’t come, and I got up at 3:30 and swilled it down with a glass of water.
Awake again at 8, feeling a bit groggy, I called my doctor’s office in Connecticut and spoke to the general secretary who told me to call the pharmacy and make sure they had the medication.
Half-an-hour on hold with the Barneveld Walgreens. Listening to the bored voice of a young man assuring me at thirty-second intervals how important my call was. When a person did finally pick up, she confirmed that they had what I needed.
Back on the phone to my doctor, I was put through to a different woman who took all my information again and said she would pass what I required on to my prescriber.
I spoke gingerly, mindful that my own forgetfulness had caused all the trouble. “Realistically, how long do you think this whole thing might take?”
She sounded reasonably sympathetic. “Patients usually get the medication by end of day.”
I thanked her, praying she meant the end of the working day, which, for me, would still be three missed pills. (Only two if I hadn’t panicked at 3:30.) What shape was I going to be in by then?
By now it was ten o’clock, and I didn’t have a headache, but I did feel jittery, like I was about to take a really important test I hadn’t studied for. I knew it was far too soon for me to be in withdrawal, and that the pounding in my chest was “merely” anxiety.
We went for a walk to help calm me down, setting out along the shore road that ran around the southern end of the lake. The day had gone overcast and the wind was getting up, but the berry clusters on the mountain ash were bright red, yellow leaves were twirling into the ditches full of golden rod, and the tangles of fir, spruce, and pine smelled of warm resin. The houses along the shore road were a mixed bunch, some new and pristine, some clearly there for years, often huge and in need of repair. Most of them didn’t have cars in front of them. We’d left the day after Labor Day, so any families with children would have gone home. We did meet an older lady out for a walk who said she’d been spending her summers in the Adirondacks for fifty years, but that she was also packing to leave. It was the quiet we’d hoped for, but somehow, under the circumstances, it felt eerie.
Back at the house, two hours after I first called my doctor’s, I called Walgreens again and spent another thirty minutes on hold listening to the same young man repeat how important my call was. Finally, a human picked up. He was kind and sympathetic, but no, they still had no record of that prescription.
By now, it was noon, and I was two pills behind. The jittery feeling had not gone away, and there was now a tightness in my head that I knew from experience could be nothing at all or the beginning of a whopping migraine. I permitted myself a brief moment of panic and fought the urge to cry. Then I picked up the phone and redialed my doctor.
“We haven’t had time to send it yet,” the woman who’d been sympathetic two hours ago had turned peevish. “Your provider has had back-to-back appointments all morning.”
I tried to sound contrite, to prove I understood. “I know that. I do, it’s just…”
“You do know this can sometimes take from 48 to 72 hours?”
48 to 72 hours?! Whoa! What happened to end of day?
That’s when the voices start in your head, telling you the woman on the phone, your doctor, the pharmacists, and everyone else you’re dealing with are all caught in the same system you are. They’re just caught at different points in that system. You know some of the complexities and understand there are probably lots of complexities you don’t, but another voice tells you it isn’t unreasonable to expect to have a prescription sent after two hours, especially when they know you have nothing.
“If that’s how long it’s going to take,” I said. “Then I should just pack up and go home. I’m frightened how dangerous it is for me to stop taking this.”
Did my voice waver? Did I sound like I was going to sob?
“Could you hold a minute?”
I could see my husband back out on the Adirondack chairs, thriller in hand, facing the loons who seemed to live on the float, and looking up at the sky which was becoming increasingly threatening. How was I going to go out and tell him that we would need to repack the car and go home?
“It’s been sent.” She was back on the line. “Actually,” she sounded apologetic, “it was already sent. It must have just crossed when we were speaking.”
I thanked her, went out, and told my husband we could go now. No, I didn’t want to call Walgreens again. I couldn’t face another half hour on hold listening to that terrible recording. I’d deal with whatever it was when we got to the pharmacy.
New York Route 8 ran west through densely packed forests of evergreens and hamlets full of abandoned houses, houses that looked abandoned but probably weren’t, and homes with emerald front lawns mowed to the tree line, pristine outbuildings, and bright beds of zinnias and sunflowers. These tiny settlements bore the grandiose names of large European countries.
Somewhere between Poland and Russia, it started to pour.
We pulled into Barneveld as the downpour drenched a fogbound strip of fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and motels. The local Walgreens was like every other Walgreens I’ve ever been in, long aisles of merchandise no one was looking at, the only activity clustered around the pharmacy in the back. In this case, there wasn’t even that. No one except us was in the store.
The girl at the counter smiled, typed, and then looked apologetic. “I’m sorry. We have no record of that prescription.”
Too numb to cry.
Not really surprised.
“Wait a minute!” an older woman called from the back as I was whipping out my phone to dial my doctor. I recognized her voice as the first person I’d talked to that morning.
She bustled forward, easing the young girl gently aside.
“Here it is. It’s in a different place because it’s from out of state,” she said to the girl. “It’s not ready yet,” she told me. “But we’ll have it for you in about five minutes.”
I sat down next to my husband and sank into a stupor of relief.
Back in the car, pill bag already soggy, rain pounding on the roof, I suggested we visit The Lifted Cup Cafe. It was now 1:30.
“How far is it?” my husband asked.
We typed it into GPS.
It was across the street.
Stepping into The Lifted Cup felt transformative. It was warm and well-lit, low-eaved and wood-paneled. There were two women sitting in front of an old-fashioned stove having one of those convivial conversations I’d imagined. There were two older gentlemen at another table calmly discussing current events. At other tables, there were people who had clearly finished their meals but were reluctant to leave this oasis of peace and community. My husband and I filled in our order cards and placed them on the counter. We helped ourselves to coffee.
At our table, where I could see the walls were covered with the names of servicemen who’d eaten there, I placed my coffee mug in front of me and began to unscrew the pill bottle to shake out a double dose. With the two pills in my hand, my eyes rose to the wooden rafter above me. Burned into its polished wood surface were the words: “I shall lift up the cup of Salvation and call upon the Name of the Lord.” (Psalm 116; Verse 13)
I had misunderstood. The image of the lifted cup did not mean the ancient comfort of human beings gathered to take sustenance, or it did not only mean that. It was also an offering of thanksgiving and of gratitude for divine deliverance.
I’m not sure I had help from above in filling my prescription, but I was thankful to have it in my hand. I was grateful to the people who helped me and for the imperfect health care system that finally delivered it. I placed the two pills on my tongue and lifted my cup, thinking of all the bad outcomes I had been saved from.
