Picking Up a Prescription

 I'm 64 years old and in relatively good health, but I take several medications for chronic conditions.  Hereditary high blood pressure, high cholesterol, blood sugar management, etc.  Before you gasp and say that it really sounds like I'm a train wreck, let me just say that our health in the latter part of our lives is highly dependent on our lifestyle choices earlier in life and also by how our bodies handle the normal aging process.  I'm a former smoker and was at one point a consistent heavy drinker.

As I've gotten older, I've paid the price for some of those choices, but I'm very lucky in that I haven't paid a super high price for making them.  For that I'm grateful every day now.  I really don't deserve to be in good health at age 64.  Luckily I can function relatively normally on a day to day basis as long as I take my maintenance medications as instructed and don't do anything really stupid.  Some of my friends have not been so lucky.  Many are now deceased and others struggle to just get through every day.  I am thankful for what I have.

This post is about a trip I recently made to the pharmacy to pick up refills of the aforementioned maintenance medications.  My lovely wife, Tanya, said she also had some prescriptions ready to be picked up and asked me if I could get hers while I was there.  She is a little younger than me, although she tells our friends that she is much, much younger.  I won't go there in this post.

I got to the pharmacy and decided to just go to the drive-up window.  Our pharmacy is in a very busy grocery store and I didn't want to deal with the lunch hour crowd.  As luck would have it, there was no line at the drive-up window.  The Pharmacy Tech greeted me pleasantly as soon as I drove up.  They are always very friendly, but many times you get a Tech who would really rather be somewhere else and they certainly let you know it.

I was lucky enough to get one of the more enthusiastic ones and I asked for the prescriptions for Jeff and Tanya.  I used fake names, addresses, and birth dates in this post for obvious reasons, but I gave him the real ones.  You get the idea.  This was the dialog:

"Hi, I'd like to pick up the prescriptions for Jeff and Tanya Smith."

He looked us up on his computer and said "Ok, great.  I'll be right back with them" and disappeared back into the recesses of the pharmacy.  When he came back he opened up some plastic bags with all our drugs and eventually asked:

"What is your last name?"

I had just given it to him and he had just used it to find our prescriptions, but I gave it to him again anyway.  He nodded and sent out a signature sheet in the security drawer.  I signed it and returned it to the drawer.  Once the sheet was safely back in his hands he said:

"Can you verify your address?" 

So I gave him my address.  

"999 Main Street, Omaha, Nebraska, 68888."

He immediately asked for my birthday so I gave him that, too.  He then said:

"What is your address?"

I said "It's still 999 Main Street, Omaha, Nebraska 68888."  He looked at his computer and promptly asked me for my driver's license.  I put it in the security drawer and after retrieving it he briefly scanned it and asked for my birthday again.

"5/5/55" 

He looked at the computer again for a minute and then asked:

"How many prescriptions are you picking up and what are they?"

"I don't know.  The automated system just sent me a text and said I had prescriptions ready so I'm here to pick them up, whatever they are."

He nodded and returned my driver's license in the drawer.  A line of cars behind me had formed and it was growing by the minute.  He dropped my prescriptions into a small paper pharmacy bag and then asked:

"Who is the other person you're picking up for?"

"Tanya Smith, but you already know that since you went back into the pharmacy and grabbed her prescriptions already."

Normally I would be quite angry by now and probably would have told this guy to get his shit together and give me our damned prescriptions, but this time it was just too comical for anger and nasty words.  He said:

"Please verify her address."

"The same as mine.  999 Main Street, Omaha, 68888."  This time I left out the state, so he asked:

"What state?"

"Nebraska.  We are married and we live at the same address.  In the same house.  we share everything except prescriptions.  She has her own for her particular health requirements.  We are two different people.  Living at the same address.  In Nebraska."

"Please verify her birthdate."

"4/4/44."

"Ok."

He looked at the computer for a long time and then said:

"Please verify her address."

" This is getting ridiculous.  Please give me the prescriptions and tell me how much they are."

"I need to see her driver's license."

"I don't have her driver's license.  She drove to work and she needed to keep it with her."

"What's the name of her insurance company?"

"The same as mine.  United Insurance."

"I need to verify her insurance card." And he opened the security drawer again.

"I don't have her insurance card, but it's the same as mine.  Both our names are on both cards."

He apparently didn't want to deal with my insurance card and I was getting a little testy, so he said:

"$14.23. We might be able to do better than that with GoodRX instead of your insurance.  Do you want me to run it through GoodRX and see if it comes up with a better price?"

By this time I was ready to flip this guy $1000 cash plus the titles to our camper and one of the cars, and also throw in an all inclusive week in Cancun just to give me my drugs and let me leave.  

"No thanks.  $14.23 is fine.

I put my debit card in the drawer and sent it back.  He printed some receipts and drug information and stuffed the drugs into the small bag, carefully stapled it shut with several staples, and then sent it out in the drawer.  I immediately grabbed it, fearing that he might yank it back and demand a hair follicle in order to confirm my identity through DNA analysis.  By this time the line of cars behind me was getting very long and several of them were honking their horns.

"Your card is in the bag."

I thanked him for his hard work and diligence and then drove out of the pickup lane. It had taken almost 20 minutes to pick up our prescriptions.  The exit lane from the drive-up ended in the supermarket's loading dock area.  I pulled over to get my card from the paper bag and return it to my wallet.  One time in the past I didn't do this and ended up at the grocery store checkout lane with no way to pay for my groceries because my card was sitting in a prescription bag on our kitchen counter.  

I fought my way into the bag that was apparently sealed well enough to withstand a nuclear blast and carefully removed about 30 pages of drug interaction information.  No card.  He still had my card.

Rather than wait in what was now a 90 minute line of cars back at the pharmacy drive-up window, I parked the car and went inside to the pharmacy counter and asked them to retrieve my card.  They asked my name only once and then they were able to retrieve my card in a few minutes.  

You should know that most trips to this pharmacy are quick and uneventful.  The only time I have ever had a problem with them is once when I got a text saying I had a prescription ready for pickup.  I stopped by on my lunch hour thinking it was just one of my automatic refills I get all the time.  When I was picking it up and got to the payment part they said it would be $224.50 because my insurance didn't cover it.  It was someone else's prescription for Viagra that the pharmacy had filled and put on my account.  I guess if the other guy did that on purpose expecting a big discount then the joke's on him.  My insurance apparently doesn't cover Viagra.