Ooops… I dropped my pill on the floor and I can’t find it! Has that ever happened to you?
Opening my pill box yesterday morning, I turned it over to shake out my pills when one bounced out of my hand and toward the kitchen floor. I THOUGHT it landed somewhere to my left, but I couldn’t see it. Getting down on my hands and knees, I looked around where I heard it hit the floor. After ten minutes of fruitless searching, I reluctantly accepted that my capsule of vitamin D had completely vanished.
Small children and pets can discover pills dropped on the floor, and when they find one it usually ends up in their mouth. When you and your family gather together for the holidays, will your children, grandchildren and pets be safe from accidentally ingesting a dangerous dose of prescription medicine?
Many Americans take at least one prescription medicine. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2016, nearly half of all Americans reported using at least one prescription medicine in the past month. Not only that, but nearly a quarter of all Americans take 3 or more prescription medicines and over 12% report that they had taken 5 or more prescription medicines within the past 30 days.
Unfortunately, it only takes one pill to trigger a tragedy. Most pain and heart medicines are designed for full-size adults, not inquisitive toddlers or small pets. Discovering a pill on the floor or in a bottle sitting innocently on a table, little children and powerful pills don’t mix well.
I absolutely LOVE pillboxes for their convenience and how they help us remember whether we have taken our medicine. Many of us keep them in plain sight, but they can be easily opened.
Locking away pain medicine, especially narcotics or opioid medicines like Vicodin® and oxycodone can prevent tragedy. Teenagers report getting their supply of narcotic pain pills from their family and friends’ medicine cabinets. And medicines designed for adults weighing over 150 pounds are particularly dangerous to a 20-pound child or pet finding them on the floor or in a trash can.
One of the main reasons pharmacies dispense new prescription bottles with every refill is to ensure that the child-resistant lids on medicine bottles don’t become easier to open as they get used.
Although you can sign a waiver in order to get “easy-open” lids on your prescription medicines, most people don’t bother. Instead, they either replace the new lids with older, worn ones that they can open easily, or swap out the new bottle of pills for an older bottle with a lid they can easily open. Others just don’t put the lids on all the way. Unfortunately, when you pick up a bottle with the lid barely on by the lid, it can let go and spill out the pills which then bounce out of sight.
My late mother-in-law insisted on “recycling” all of her old pill bottles with child-resistant tops into the toy box for her grandchildren to play with by trying to open them. As a young pharmacist and new parent, I always sorted through the toys to collect any pill bottles lurking in the toy box at Grandma’s before letting my daughter Maureen play there.
With the holidays here, many families plan a visit over the hills and through the woods to grandma and grandpa’s house. But is grandma’s house safe enough for your little ones?
Here are 3 Ways to Help Prevent Accidental Ingestion of Prescription Medicines:
- Put pills and pillboxes away when small children visit.
For toddlers who are curious and quick, a colorful pillbox can create an irresistible challenge. Moving pillboxes out of reach or locking them up is safer than trying to keep track of grandchildren when they’re visiting.
- Lock up or carefully dispose of pain pills and patches.
Nearly everything picked up by a toddler or dog finds its way into their mouth. Powerful narcotics can be swallowed or sucked out of used patches, triggering a preventable tragedy. Vacuuming floors where you may have dropped a pill and sealing up used patches by folding them together before disposal in the trash help ensure a safe holiday season. If a used patch contains a narcotic like fentanyl, the FDA recommends flushing it down the toilet instead of putting it in your trash.
- Keep chocolate candies and chocolate cookies away from dogs.
Dogs are wildly attracted to the smell of chocolate. An entire chocolate orange or plate of fudgy brownies can be eaten by a dog in minutes. Chocolate is deadly to dogs because unlike humans, their bodies cannot detoxify caffeine. The smaller the animal, the less chocolate is needed to poison them. Consuming a 6-ounce bag of chocolate chips is usually fatal for a 20-lb dog.
