notageek

I had a final this morning; my immediate supervisor called just as I got home and asked if I could come in today, as a tech had called in sick. I had been looking forward to a day of packing and sodding off, since I start full-time tomorrow—but since the BH’s first paycheque went almost entirely to paying for our (new, improved, billable-from-the-pharmacy) health insurance, we could really use the money at this point.

Damnit.

In my rush to get out there I’d forgotten to print a bus schedule, and I waited 20 minuets in the unfamiliar sunlight, steadily growing warmer and wishing I hadn’t worn my wool stockings. Since I’d forgotten my mediocre fantasy book of the week (The One-Armed Queen,, by Jane Yolen, if you were wondering), I picked the copy of this week’s Stranger someone had left on the bus seat.

I have part of a long piece sitting in my WordPress draft queue about how despite being a leftish prochoice women’s healthcare rights advocate, I don’t support laws requiring pharmacists to fill all medically legitimate, legal prescriptions, but it comes down to this:

I don’t think it’s appropriate to require persons to participate in treatment they categorically disagree with, and I don’t think this constitutes discrimination. I personally find it repugnant when pharmacists refuse to dispense emergency contraception—and I think it’s professionally indefensible to lecture patients instead of finding them a pharmacist who will fill it—but I think my fellow lefties who would sacrifice my professional rights on the altar of Plan B need to stuff it.

Which is why I started reading the Stranger’s latest piece on WA Governer Chris Gregoire trying to make like a big politician coming down on the pharmacist board for voting in approval of a conscience clause, but put it down. It says the same thing every leftist anti-pharmacist rant has said about the decline-to-dispense issue: the collective rights of women to get healthcare at the specific pharmacy of their choosing is more important than the right of pharmacists to determine what services they provide.

I can make myself sick with anger, thinking about this. I also picked up a decent case of motion sickness, reading on the bus like that. We pulled into downtown Seattle, and I jumped on the next bus, panting rapidly to keep the nausea down.

I am tired of being angry. I am tired of my profession being dragged through the mud in the press over a medication that should have been approved for OTC use, but hasn’t been due to the Bush administration, and that almost every woman of childbearing potential should have had prescribed to her in advance. Prescribers are at fault. Pharmacists who lecture are at fault. Patients are at fault. Systems that pit pharmacists against patients are at fault. But I don’t think pharmacists who genuinely care for their patients but don’t feel they can participate in assisted suicide, medical abortions, implantation prevention or a host of other situations are at fault, any more than OB/GYNs who don’t perform abortions. No matter how shrill my fellow lefties get about women’s healthcare, it’s still about trampling on my rights.

And that’s bullshit, yo.