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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Some last words on pills and the Web This will be the last "Over the Back Fence" column, at least for a while. This is column number 212 in the series that began on June 15, 1995. In that 5�-year period, I tried to stick to the goals I first set for myself. One was that most of the subjects would be more or less personal. It was to be a sort of diary of things I had seen or done, including writing about a subject that isn�t covered in depth in any newspaper or broadcast � the plight of elderly people in nursing homes who�ve paid out almost their last dollar for service and are shifted from Medicare to Medicaid. I also wanted to write the column in "street English," instead of the usual polished style of most newspapers. This is because I wrote for three or more decades for radio and television, which aims for the ear and takes more liberties with formal English. I have two subjects for today�s last column. One is to let you know that my work has appeared on the World Wide Web. The second is on senior citizens and prescription drugs. It has only been a few months since I first ventured on the Web, after many years of using a computer only as a fancy typewriter. Then, a few days ago, a caller asked me this question: "How do you make a mustard plaster?" I answered that I didn�t have the foggiest notion of what it�s made of, but I could remember that when I was about 6, my mother put one on my chest for a very bad cold. "The cloth was very hot," I said. The woman identified herself as 75-year-old Jane Marshall of West Virginia. She and a friend had seen a mustard plaster used as a prop in a television documentary about the pioneers, but no mention was made of the exact ingredients. The women went to the Web and typed in the keywords "Folk Medicine" and "Mustard Plasters," and up popped my column on remedies from outside the mainstream. I asked the two women to let me know if they found that the heat came from anything other than plain old hot mustard. I haven�t heard back. The other part of this farewell column is about how seniors should be extra careful in handling and storing medicines. I saw somewhere that the average 75-year-old person takes 10 or more pills a day. My lack of care in storing mine led to the last couple of weeks being a period of intermittent depression. I should have done something about this earlier than I did, considering my childhood problems with depression. After a week of slowly going downhill, I opened the middle drawer of my desk and found the answer, an empty medicine bottle. I had put that container on the top of the desk as a signal to myself to get a refill. Sometime later, without really thinking about it, I must have moved the bottle to the middle drawer. By the time I found the empty bottle, I had been going downhill for seven or eight days. You might think that missing a few days of medication shouldn�t have been so unsettling, but it was. I didn�t exhibit a lot of outward signs. Rather, I had short periods when I couldn�t remember what day it was. Then I got lost in the dark while entering our small bedroom. I wound up against the wall where I thought the bed should have been. On two occasions, I thought I heard a band playing in the distance. Then I came to bed one night feeling shaken. When my wife, Nora, asked why, I explained that a heavy-set woman almost hit me while she was falling downstairs. We don�t have any stairs. Once we replaced the pills, I slowly came back to normality, or as normal as I can be. The warnings about side effects from using medication were once on the pill bottle, but since World War II, they are printed on several letter-sized pages. A pharmacist usually does a good job of going through the pages of warnings to customers and pointing out the sections in the document that raise red flags about possible side effects. Well, I�m beginning to feel like my time in this space has ended. Over these years, I�ve met wonderful, caring people who have stopped Nora and me on the street to talk about the columns written about the old days. We�ll miss you. Thanks for reading. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.