Living two hours away from an elderly relative makes long-distance caregiving an absolute logistical nightmare. My grandmother was fiercely independent, but she had reached a point where she was consistently missing her medication doses. Because we couldn’t check in on her daily, her health was beginning to take a quiet, dangerous dip.
Unbeknownst to our family, a pharmacy technician named Donna at her local Walgreens noticed that my grandmother’s vital prescriptions were constantly lapsing. Instead of letting her slip through the cracks of a busy corporate system, Donna took it upon herself to act. She quietly set up automatic refills for every single one of the prescriptions.
But she didn’t stop there. Every single Friday like clockwork, Donna called my grandmother directly to confirm she was tracking her schedule and taking everything properly. On one particular Saturday, when my grandmother’s scheduled ride completely fell through, Donna packed up the medication and drove it over to her house herself on her own day off.
We only found out about this incredible intervention because my grandmother kept mentioning a friend named Donna during our weekly catch-up calls. When we finally asked who this mystery woman was, we discovered she had been doing this out of the goodness of her heart for almost four months. Her store manager had absolutely no idea. She just looked at a vulnerable regular, decided my grandmother needed someone looking out for her, and stepped up to be that person.