notageek

I worked slightly over half of today’s pharmacist-hours. Of the pitifully small number of scripts processed in that time, I dispensed half our Relenza and all of our Tamiflu, and I sold a bajillion boxes of surgical-style masks. Oh, and some lady freaked out because the cheapo off-brand surgical-style masks don’t have a particle micron-size filter label but the 3M ones do.

What the hell, people? We are nowhere near any of the documented swine flu cases. It is not a bad idea to have surgical-style facemasks around. It is not even a bad idea to read up on the situations in which an antiviral would be of use. But it is really, really dumb to go freaking out because somebody else already snapped up the last available box of Tamiflu in this neighbourhood. There is a supplier shortage of Tamiflu precisely because so many people are inappropriately panicking and filling scripts inappropriately when they will be of no anti-infective benefit.

YOU DON’T NEED IT, people in my patient population. And by taking it now, you are ensuring that, should this swine flu actually go pandemic, someone who needs it will go without; moreover, if you even do have flu of some kind, you are almost certainly not taking the antiviral in a manner which will reduce your symtomatic illness at all. Take your multivit, get enough sleep, eat un-crappy food and for fuck’s sake wash your hands and don’t pick at your nose. Take vitamin C, if you want. And quit listening to the “news coverage” on the “not-a-pandemic-YET!” because it will just make you stressed, paranoid, and ready to waste antivirals.

I now have a license, students and completed preceptor CE credits, which means that once I’ve been licensed for a year, I’ll also be a pharmacy preceptor.

I think this—in conjunction with other signifiers like the house, car and spouse—qualifies me as an adult, and true to adult form I cannot stop mining my past to try and figure out what actually happened, that my fifteen-year-old fuckup self ended up a “skilled professional”. The retrospective analysis is never enough, but it’s also all we have.

So this is something new for me and my weblog: a series. I had originally begun a list of “things I wish I’d known before rotations” as its own entry, but it was too long and too scattershot to be an entry, or even a FAQ. These aren’t the answers to frequently asked questions, anyway; they’re the answers to questions I didn’t know needed to be asked before I was a student extern, or a pharmacist. I want to tell you the material we should have learned in dispensing lab; the real complement to the PK/PD and medchem and therapeutics.

Also, I promise this series will still be about how I hate everything.

In a corner of my drawer at the pharmacy, I have a pair of very small circular knitting needles and a ball of yarn I unravelled from a thrift-store sweater. I pick them up and work a few rows on especially low-volume days. Knitting calms and soothes me, with the added benefit of a soft, pretty product—sometimes even one that’s wearable. Also, its products don’t require dishwashing afterwards.

I am not an artist. I’m not even an artisan. Much as I learned to be a pretty good home cook—by close observation, by trial and sometimes catastrophic error, by extensive background reading—I have become a pretty good knitter. Like a weekend athlete, I’m just skilled enough to recognize what takes extraordinary effort and talent to execute. I have a much deeper appreciation of those crochet-cotton lace bedspreads my aunt used to make.

My mom is a quilter, so she’s trained my eyes for the difficult, the beautiful and the stunningly-executed in quiltwork. I know to look for the fine, even stitches, the squared corners, the repetition of motifs and the play of colour. It’s mesmerising, even though it’s a language I don’t entirely understand. Like knitting, it’s a low-technology production method traditionally practiced by women, often with ornate embellishment of objects with mundane purposes and until recently underappreciated as an art by people who didn’t practice it. I think the public has a better understanding of the skill and control necessary to lathework, or oil painting on canvas, than it does of that demanded by prepping, spinning and manipulating fibers.

Anyway, this is all to say that the use of modern artistic sensibilities and messages in conjunction with traditional fiber arts techniques can be powerful, even stunning, and as traditionally female-dominated media, I think their anthropologic and historical examination can shed light on women and power in traditional societies, the need for expression, the importance of the ordinary and a bajillion other interesting things.

Or, we can have crap like this:

The exhibit presents her bold, painterly, and abstract expressionist visual aesthetic as an outgrowth of her exploration of the quilt and the bed as emotionally and psychologically charged sites.

Actually, the exhibit presents ugly, unbalanced and lumpy quilts with no apparent unifying themes other than large, sloppy stitching, haphazard piecework and automated machine-quilting. They co-opt skilled women’s traditions and art’s language, and do justice to neither.

Radka Donnell offers an intriguing explanation why art historians, art critics and major arts institutions have, by and large, not taken quilts seriously as an art form.

I have a better one: maybe it’s because your quilts suck as art, and they also suck as quilts.

Dear nurse I talked to at a hospital I no longer work for:
The pharmacy is not calling you because we have nothing better to do. We are not bored, and we do not have a fondness for bothering office staff. I am calling you because the prescription is wrong and I need to correct it before I can dispense it. Legally, medically and ethically.
Do not tell me “Well, that’s what the doctor wrote.” I know that’s what the doctor wrote. It’s what the prescription says, and the prescription is wrong. I know you are trying to squirm out of dealing with this phone call.

Your office and my pharmacy are both on the hook until the patient is done with this medication. Don’t you pretend your responsibility ended when the doctor signed and the patient left the building.

If you don’t know how to pronounce the drug name, it’s OK to spell it out on the voice mail. An indication would be nice, too.

Still, there’s something uniquely poetic in dubbing an antidepressant “despairamine”.