notageek

It was pouring, and I had let a rambunctious 6-year-old sit on my back almost the entire time, so my feet were both soggy and sore. Someone borrowed my sweater and someone kept thanking me for shutting the 6-year-old up and almost everyone brought some sort of prepared starch and deposited it on the ping-pong table in the garage.

Six-year-olds are not particularly light, but in comparison to letting one run lightly but roughshod over the service, letting one sit piggyback for an hour or two isn’t that bad. I shifted him to my right hip when the minister stopped talking. I shifted him to my left hip when we sang all however-many verses of “Amazing Grace”. I slung him over a shoulder when everyone started filing up to light candles. I shushed him but once: “Hush, Danny. Everyone is sad.” And he shushed good.

I’m not sure that anyone ever actually knows what to say when someone dies, or if I’m convinced by arguments that humans used to live much better and more closely with death. More frequent meetings, sure, but how can you have a relationship that is “close” or “better” with something that snatches your beloved from you while dealing only pain? I didn’t know what to say. Instead, I kept the 6-year-old out of everyone else’s hair, and I brought tissues. With the aloe lotion shit, yo.

And I tried to guard my friend–my best friend,from high school, for almost half our stupid lives–from the well-meaning but idiotic people who didn’t have the sense to know that they didn’t know what to say.
“‘I am not gone; I am nearer than breath; nearer than your hands and feet.’ The relationship just changes. I would be honoured if you would share with me when your father contacts you.”
“I don’t even know who that woman is,” my friend muttered through her teeth. I grabbed one of the towels she and her sister had been hiding from the rain under during the service, and sponged some water out of her hair.
“Dione–” I said, and my fucking voice cracked, and the sheer inadequacy of anything I could say hit me, and I started swearing about not being able to fix anything worth fixing until we both fell on each others’ shoulders and sobbed like the adults we’ve almost become. Quietly. Shakily.

I suspect that trying to find the good in everything is pathological. Sometimes good things come of shit, and sometimes just shit comes of shit, and there’s no use denying it. Heart disease in the guise of indigestion struck my friend’s father down at what’s usually midlife, and believe me–there’s no good come of it. Most people who die these days are old and have chronic diseases of some sort, and so people tell my friend things like, “At least he wasn’t suffering.” Yeah, that’s a real cold comfort. She railed for a few minutes about all the stupid shit people say to her, but especially how someone dying slowly, you get to say everything you ever wanted to say to them before they’re gone, and maybe you can actually believe it when it happens.

After the service I went hunting for the sweater I’d left neatly on the coatrack by the door. “Ah,” said my friend. “That was your first mistake.” I found it on someone sitting around a firepit in the backyard, behind the gazebo where I found the minister taking hits off a bong with the widow, dulling the pain. Several hundred people crowded the yard that day, and most of them brought food and all of them helped clean the house or the yard or clear out the garage, and if you were a fucking Pollyanna you might argue that’s something good has come of this death, but if you’re me, you just know deep down that it’s shit. This family, they’re loved by their community, and they were loved before he died of a broken heart.

“You’d think it’s really hard–but it gets easier. He was blue at first, but he got–paler. And cold.”

And so too does the grief, my love. Rage on, against the dying of the light.

the doubled blossoms burst, shoving syrup scent over:
a seasonful of exhaust, rain-pounded into pavement
five months of refrigerated refuse, now thawed.

while it is wet
yet
it is spring.

spring is a water-torture of a season
to take in any is to take all or risk drowning;
bone-chill can be taken politely
in bites
‘twixt scarves and tea.

And oh yes, spring is beautiful
the long light coming back through leaves to throw pale blinking moons
on walls, on walks
the stars actually twinkling in some frigid perfumed nights

but spring thaws my memory, too
a woman well needs no cure
spring’s hope is the unwelcome empiric therapy,
the unctuous inescapable salve,
the lifting of the last veil.

Let’s say I am managing my pharmacy someday with my right hand on the keyboard, and I’m bouncing a spawnlet on my left hip with my left arm because I can still sort of type and heck, I’m in the office and there’s no drugs in there and plenty of chewable, non-toxic schwag items. This is the sort of best-case secnario I keep in my head for the moments when I could have designed an exercise TWENTY times more effective with less DOWN TIME and OHMIGOD is EVERYONE in my career going to be so INEFFECTIVE and TOUCHY-FEELY. That vision sustains me.

So let’s say you are a pharmacist in my employ, and you refuse to give a patient their medication for a good reason. That, midear, is what you are supposed to do, as a pharmacist. The patient is unlikely to agree with you, and you will probably get no end of flak about this and you will need to come to me, as your supervisor and the person who hired you, for backup.

And I will back you up, because I (that is to say, the organisation that hired you) will have screened you and had irritating ethical discussions with you that ensure that we have similar philosophies about which medications should be dispensed to which types of patients, and I trust your judgement. Of course, it’s possible for me to do that because there are forty other pharmacies in town, and I had the luxury of declining applicants who didn’t fit my needs, and the patient has the luxury of taking her prescription to another pharmacy (or to mail-order, since it’s legal here).

If your judgement on oral contraceptive pills is such that you allow moral rather than medical concerns to guide whether you dispense them, you are probably a perfectly good pharmacist; you just don’t belong in my pharmacy. You either belong in a practice environment where dispensing oral contraceptives isn’t an issue, or you belong in an institution where your decision to not dispense such medications will be backed up by your supervisor, ideally ad infinitum. (Incidentally, if you refer to oral contraceptive pills as “birth control” when you talk to me, I am going to kick you out on your ass anyway.)

Furthermore, if you practice in such an institution, I think your institution needs to have a sign right next to “this pharmacy may be able to substitute a therapeutically equivalent medication at a reduced cost” to the effect of “this pharmacy does not reliably dispense contraceptive (birth control) medications”, so that your female customers of childbearing age can take their business elsewhere. (Incidentally, because women tend to pick up prescriptions for the entire family, that means you will be brown-bagging geriatrics all day. Good luck with that!)

But why do I, a raging feminist, think this, and not, say, that “a pharmacist’s job is to dispense medication not mal judgment”, as Steve Trombley, Planned Parenthood president, does in a quote I yanked from the CSM? I’d have to say it’s because I’m going to be a pharmacist, and because of this uppity idea pharmacists have lately about being professionals. We’re not pill-dispensing machines, Steve, and we’re not the dispensing arm of the prescribing body. We’re drug-specialist healthcare providers, and if you grant physicians the latitude to not perform abortions, I think you need to grant pharmacists the latitude to not provide the means by which to cause a missed implantation. We dispense our judgement every time we fill or don’t fill a script, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to require someone to do something s/he considers wrong.

And yes, I recognise this leaves women in small towns in a bind, but it’s not any more of a bind than they’re already in with one OB/GYN who doesn’t do D&Cs in certain situations, and with mail-order pharmacy and growing freedom in OCP prescription patterns, I think the situation is actually getting a lot better. Mostly, though, I bristle at what I see as the intrusion of legislation on my right to practice pharmacy as I see fit; I think the denial of oral contraception is morally reprehensible but professionally obligatory for these pharmacists with hairs up their asses. Dispensing these medications is truly against their better judgement, and if we legislate away their right to do that, we legislate away my right to practice pharmacy as I see fit.

I have plenty of my own plans for shaking up the system up my sleeve. Get your lawyers the fuck out of my hypothetical pharmacy.

I have les mns to thank for guiding me to this revelation: nobody I have ever voted for has become president!!111

Clearly I am so politically disenfranchised that my only choices are to try to find enough mountainous woodland in Alberta to build myself a shack and pen ranty menifestos, or to go without a shower for twelve days before going to go build a shack on the steps in Olympia.

Come to think of it, my class was just down in Olympia screening the legislators for hypercholesterolemia. Alberta it is–but I’ll wait until I’ve racked up enough student loans to make fleeing worthwhile.