Trying make a function that performs a sanity check on the results table by plotting the lfc's of genes with the lowest p-adj. Normally I would just separate the columns (my samples) in my count data (DESeq data set) into groups and then perform the necessary arithmetic

log2 (normalizedcountsgroup1 / normalizedcountsgroup2)

However things have gotten more complicated since the function wouldn't know the two groups. Is there a function that I'm not aware of that provides the group "1" or "2" or better yet the normalized counts of each group

We don’t have a function like this as part of DESeq2, although if you try Google you may find some code that was posted here years ago. The support site search is not as good as Google.