notageek

Mr. See calls the pharmacy several times a week, whether he needs a prescription filled or not. He called me about the peanut butter salmonella recall. He called to ask me about whether his previous pharmacy was engaging in fraudulent Medicare billing practices. He also asked me if he should continue to take his Parkinson’s medications, and if sexual activity is ok for someone who has Parkinson’s. While I appreciate the trust he places in me, it would be nicer if he had another, more non-me person he could trust with his questions. My hearing is kind of crappy and due in part to his condition he mumbles like crazy, so I ask him to repeat everything a bajeelion times. The first time I tried to fill a prescription for him, his insurance wouldn’t go through and he wasn’t sure if it was because he hadn’t paid his premium on time. He is someone who, in a more restrained time, might have been referred to as an eccentric gentleman.

My pharmacy does “environmentally friendly medication disposal” (i.e. we take unwanted medications and put them in a bin to be incinerated at a later date; this is less hazardous than letting them leach into the water table from a landfill). Right now the meds disposal bin has a great deal of expired OTCs the front end pawned off on us, a lot of mail-order cardiac meds, someone’s bottle of Viagra with only one tablet gone, and some Epipens. Last week Mr. See brought in his last fill of meds from his previous pharmacy, and tried to have me dispose of them. I pointed out that they were the same ones he was currently taking and put them back in his bag.

This afternoon I got a call from a local ER. “Oh no,” I said. “Is this about Mr. S?”
“Oh dear,” said the doctor. “It is. And it can’t bode well that you guessed that.” Mr. See had presented to the ER with acute delirium after driving himself there. I read off all the prescribers and a complete fill history for the ER doc, and he promised to get Mr. See all better so he could come back and bother me with irrelevant questions again. I hope, I hope. Sometimes it is rather shitty to be right.