↓Skip to main content
  1. Posts/

There is no pill that will cure stupidity

·2219 words·11 mins
The Wonderful Public
Table of Contents

All pharmacies have patients like this.

  • The village idiot. 

  • Always really late or really early. 

  • Cant manage to take 3 medications (all once a day, at the same time) correctly. 

  • You think you are doing him a favor by putting all of his medications in weekly planners or blister pack, only to have a plastic baggie full of pills be returned to you because he decided to “punch them all out”. 

  • No matter how specific you make the instructions, he will always come in confused as all hell and need for you to explain it to him. 

  • Doctors think its a cruel joke to prescribe him a blood glucose monitor with insulin and defer the instruction to you.

  • The lady who’s time has long come and gone

  • Is about 100 years old

  • Gets hospitalized about twice to three times a month.  Each month she gets discharged with 4 pages of meds, all different sigs and strengths which means that you have a whole mess of stuff that needs to be sorted out with insurance companies.

  • Has no idea what shes on, what shes taking, when she takes it (see above with the joys of this)

  • Decides that arguing with you about the most retarded things (like how many refills are on her Toprol) somehow is a good thing.

  • Ms Know-It-All

  • Retired Teacher

  • Swears by Airborne no matter what you said (CREATED BY A SCHOOL TEACHER!)

  • Always asks you your opinions and then tells you how WRONG you are because she looked it up on the internet

  • Would take advice from the homeless druggie behind her than from you, because the homeless guy has “real world experience”

  • Hypochondriac

  • “Can I get gout over my whole body?”

  • “I saw Lexapro on TV, can you tell my doctor to give me some, I think I have agoraphobia!” (as he’s standing in front of you with a store full of people)

  • Any daylight savings time changes completely crushes his life

  • He keeps a log of what he has eaten for the past year (3 bites of tuna, 2 crackers) and takes his blood sugar about 10 times a day.  Did I mention that he’s not a diabetic?

  • “I drank a gallon of water and now I’m pee’ing all the time! I think I’m losing my potassium”

  • Any explanation about anything medical just leads to another 20 phone-calls that day with another 100 questions.

  • Other pharmacies have gotten restraining orders against him (no shit!)

  • The last minute filler

  • Comes at 10 min until closing wanting hospital discharge meds filled or a plastic baggie full of empty pill bottles from another store (thats closed)

  • Wants to wait

  • Insurance wont go through or they go through but were filled by another pharmacy thats closed for the day

  • Doesn’t have any cards

  • Makes you want to go home and drink.

Comments #

Comment by PharmDawg on 2008-03-27 09:56:15 -0700 #

My favorite is the woman who would keep a running (one-way) dialogue detailing exactly how much she new about each med (from the PDR- head smack!), how the pharmacist should fill, what color socks the pharmacist should wear etc. To make her even more pleasent she would stand at the register and pour her pills on the counter to make sure that she had not been shorted on ther medication. Finally growing sick of it, my boss waited until she brought in a script for Lasix # 100. He winked at us and quickly poured 105 tablets in the bottle. She went through the whole process of counting….twice. She lit out of the store faster than a hooker running from cop..never once acknowleging our overfill!

Comment by http://openid.aol.com/AmyArmstrong8 on 2008-03-27 19:35:35 -0700 #

I love your posts. It makes me laugh to know that I am not the only one that notices the general public is not paying attention or helpful in regards to their own health care. I would however note that I take exception to your use of the word “retarded”. Not cool my friend. My daughter has mental retardation as a medical diagnosis and I advocate for her to the enth degree.
Please use another adjective to describe if you will. Thanks from the bottom of my heart.

Comment by Drama Mama on 2008-03-27 20:52:48 -0700 #

ROTFLMAO!!! I think I know some of these patients-unfortunatly!
My mother reads every single drug information sheet the pharmacy gives her with her meds- Then of course she develops every single side effect! Then proceeds to drive me crazy!

Comment by indietech on 2008-03-27 21:42:12 -0700 #

i see more than my fair share of the last-minute fillers. we had one last night that was a joy to serve. a man came in 8 minutes to close to fill an oxycontin and roxicodone script for his girlfriend. he then left our store to go next door for a minute while we filled it for him. however, we still had to wait for him to return as we had a question on his discount card. when he finally returned 2 minutes to closing, we got the question answered and then only needed to count it out. he informed us he was leaving again when a tech told him not to go very far as we were closing. five minutes AFTER we closed, he comes sauntering in the door, and then asks us to wait FIVE MORE minutes so that his brother can come and pay for his girlfriend’s medication.
luckily i had an excuse to leave right at closing, so i wasn’t stuck waiting around for this “brother” to get there with $700.

Comment by the little tech that does….. on 2008-03-28 09:56:41 -0700 #

I don’t know what it is lately, but I have been noticing a high level of crying children. What is worse is apparently the parents are trying to teach the kids by ignoring the tantrums when the everyone else in a two block radius is wondering what is going on with that kid. Whatever happened to the good old days when the parents just took the kid home? (I do have sympathy for the sick ones, but not for the spoiled ones.)

Comment by pharmacy chick on 2008-03-28 18:25:30 -0700 #

Best post I have read in a while (including those I have written)
I know every one of these and could, if given enough time, think up a few of my own.
How about the Bitch-o-rette,
-A smile would break her face
-Her catch phrase is ” We have a problem”
-Can find fault with everything you do, including how you hand the bag to her.
-“thank you” is not in her vocabulary
-has a contrary remark to everything you say.
-thinks nothing of trashing you to your face, then expecting a special favor.

Comment by CPhT on 2008-03-28 19:29:49 -0700 #

Can I add another bullet to the Village Idiot?

  • The Village Idiot never abandons the drive-thru to come inside for the extensive counseling they require, then when they make it home, after a solid 45 minutes wasted at the drive-thru window, they call back within 5 minutes of making it home and ask the same exact questions, for another 45 minutes wasted.

Comment by one_angry_tech on 2008-03-28 19:35:08 -0700 #

Whoa.. these our customers!!!
Welcome to my hell.

Comment by The Ole’ Apothecary on 2008-03-28 22:22:35 -0700 #

I end up posting the same analysis, but here we go again: your front door is open to the street. Anyone from the street can walk in. So, statistically, any and all of the things you outline can, and will happen. As long as your front door is open 8 minutes before closing, someone will walk in 8 minutes before closing, etc.
Over the course of 13 years, all these things happened to me. I salute those of you who tolerate this stuff longer than I did. Perhaps if I made the decision to love it, I’d still be there. But I hated it. I hated the illogic. I hated the abuse. I hated the game-playing. I’ve since learned that one of my pharmacy classmates loves this crap. I chatted with him at our 20th-year reunion, and learned that he had been doing it for 20 years! In his own words, he lets it “roll off his back like a duck.” God love him. God save me if I didn’t decide to get out of it.

Comment by TAestP on 2008-03-28 22:56:04 -0700 #

http://openid.aol.com/AmyArmstrong8
Because of this punk ass comment and irrational fear of words, I am going to incorporate the word RETARDED in every post and comment I make forever…
You are retarded…
I’m sorry you hastily associate that word with your daughter’s condition. A normal parent would say, “my daughter has a mental deficiency” — yet you see the word retarded and take offense when you should say, “my daughter is not retarded – she cannot help her condition…”
Do you take offense to the word faggot? Just wondering…

Comment by rph3664 on 2008-03-29 08:27:55 -0700 #

TAestP, that was not funny. “Mental retardation” is a legitimate medical term with a definition and everything. “Developmentally delayed,” “mentally challenged,” etc. are not.
Read that woman’s website. Her daughter’s MR is the least of her challenges.

Comment by Heather on 2008-03-29 21:04:21 -0700 #

My favorite last minute fillers are the birth control college girls. Monday I had a chick show up at my drop-off with a pregnancy test, wanting Plan B, and demanding her refill for her birth control NOW NOW NOW!!! I laughed inside.
Where’s the category for the narc addicts. You know the cocktail: Vicodin, Soma and Xanax. They like to show up an hour before the pharmacy even opens and wait in the parking lot.

Comment by http://openid.aol.com/AmyArmstrong8 on 2008-03-30 18:04:46 -0700 #

I can laugh with the best of them and I am far from the “normal parent” and can’t respond the way you think I should. It wasn’t a knee jerk reaction either. Just something you should consider. Karma has a way of fixing such things. Someday – Someway you will love someone who has mental retardation and that word will cut your heart as it did mine when they diagnoised her wtih Lennox-Gaustaut.

Comment by Sean on 2008-03-30 21:54:40 -0700 #

Also kind of like the first person you mentioned. The person who comes in a few times a month and just comes to the window or counter or whatever and says her name and doesn’t bring in her bottles, but instead when you ask what they need filled, they say “I dont know, whatever is due” or “the little white one and the really big pink one” (generic Darvocet-N 100 usually). Oh so much fun…
Another thing that pisses me off is when they patient needs to get something refilled and it is like 3 weeks early and they said OH WELL THE DR TOLD ME TO TAKE 2 TABLETS NOW…and I say “How do we know that” and when I tell them that their doctor needs to call in a new rx with the new directions because their ins company won’t pay for it…THEY GET PISSED AT ME….common sense usually went out the window years ago for these people….

Comment by Mary Augustine on 2008-04-02 15:11:28 -0700 #

Will we ever get to hear comments from the Angriest Pharmacist again? He’s quite a guy, and has his unique (and, special) point of view.

Comment by canuckpharm on 2008-04-05 15:16:00 -0700 #

just found your blog, first time reader, can’t stop laughing !
Love the similarities between U.S. and Canuck health care(not) systems, keep up the great stuff !
Signed,
just another soldier on the front lines, 26 years and counting…Gawd

Comment by WalgreensTechie on 2008-04-06 20:28:20 -0700 #

I work at a 24 hour store, so there is no closing time (or opening, for that matter) for us. However, there’s a marked increase in business, particularly on the weekends, when every other pharmacy in the area has closed. This is when we get all the “lovely” customers. Of the 3 24-hour stores in the area, ours is closest to the majority of the hospitals, clinics, and ERs. Not surprisingly, our wait times are reflective of that. It’s not out of the question to have a two-hour wait time, especially if I’m working with a bad crew and slow pharmacists.
What I LOVE are the people who bitch at me because they have to wait so long. I kindly tell them their only other options are to take it to another store or wait and have it filled at their regular pharmacy whenever it’s next open. Usually, they bitch some more about how they need it RIGHT NOW because someone’s in some car parked in the lot with some sort of injury. At this point, I tell them they’ll just have to wait then, because everyone else has some sort of something that makes them need their meds right now, as well.
The other people I just love are the people who have obviously just purchased some drug and are calling to verify the validity of that purchase by having us identify the pill. They usually have some hair-brained story about finding some pill on the floor of their kid’s room or something, but we all know the truth. Usually, I’m so annoyed I just refer them to poison control.

↑