What a pill organizer knows about a marriage
By Hollis Treadway, Contributing editor, research review · · 3 min read
A survey of caregiving spouses over sixty-five, run by a university nursing program in the upper Midwest and reported in a gerontology journal a few years ago, asked a simple question: who fills the pill box? In couples where one partner took four or more daily medications, the other partner filled it in seventy-nine percent of cases, and that other partner was the wife in eighty-two percent of those.
The authors were interested in medication errors. I am interested in the box.
The box as a ledger
A seven-day organizer with morning and evening compartments has fourteen lids. Filling it takes, by the respondents' own estimate, between ten and twenty-five minutes a week, which does not sound like much until you add the pharmacy calls, the refill timing, the insurance letter, the question of whether the new one can be taken with the old one, and the fact that the person taking the pills, in about a third of the surveyed households, could not name more than two of them.
That last number is the one I would underline. It means the box is not a convenience. It is the only place in the house where the full regimen exists, and the only person who can read it is the person who filled it.
What the survey could not see
Self-reported time is unreliable, and the sample, about four hundred couples, skewed toward people willing to answer a long questionnaire, which tends to mean the organized ones. The eighty-two percent figure is consistent with other caregiving research, but the time estimate should be treated as a floor.
What no survey captures is what happens to the box when the filler is the one who gets sick. Several respondents wrote in the comments that they had started teaching a daughter to fill it, not because they expected to stop, but because nobody else in the house could, and that was a thing they had realized one afternoon and had not been able to put down since.
"I showed Linda how to do the Sunday one. He watched us like it was a card trick." A respondent, seventy-one, quoted in the study's appendix.
The second box
A detail from the appendix that did not make the authors' summary: in about one household in six there were two boxes, one for him and one for her, both filled by her. The respondents who reported this did not seem to find it remarkable, and the survey did not ask who would fill hers if she could not, which is the question the whole exercise was circling and never quite put. I would guess, from the comments, that the answer in most of those houses is nobody, or a daughter, or a pharmacy service nobody has looked into yet. That is a guess. The survey is silent on it, and so, in my experience, are the kitchens.
I do not have a conclusion for this. The box sits on a lot of kitchen counters. It is worth knowing who can open it.