The ragweed count in my area is through the roof. I didn’t need the weather report to tell me as much, although the Armageddon-like coverage by our weatherman at least confirmed I wasn’t imagining things. My eyes are red and itchy, my nose is red from blowing it non-stop, and my neck is sore from nearly non-stop sneezing.

At first, I thought I had a cold. My son’s had one for days, so I just assumed I’d come down with it, too. But unlike him, I don’t have a fever. I don’t even really have aches and pains. I just have a head that feels like it’s going to explode and sinuses squeaking under the weight of all the built-up snot.

Unfortunately, I ran out of my allergy pills last week and had put off calling in for a refill. See, we had a nice cold snap over the weekend and, being the occasionally optimistic person I am, I hoped it signaled the end of allergy season.

Silly me.

So today I finally broke down and called the pharmacy for a refill on my allergy meds in the hope that maybe tomorrow I’d experience a little relief. Despite how miserably watery and itchy my eyes are, I decided to pick up the refill myself rather than wait for VH to swing by after work. I needed relief ASAP!

For once, the pharmacy had the refill ready by the time I arrived. That’s a change from the 20-minute wait I usually encounter (which always leaves me wondering why I bothered to call in the refill request since they didn’t start processing it until I was standing right there). I forked over my cash and hurried home to pop a pill and wait for pharmaceutical magic to happen.

As soon as I stood in the kitchen and opened the bottle, I knew something was wrong. My little pink allergy pills weren’t so little, nor were they pink. In fact, they were yellow and oblong… and they looked strangely familiar even though they were most assuredly not my standard allergy pills.

Now, I’ve got a veritable pharmacy of my own in my medicine cabinet. While I don’t have a fancy bar code verifier, I don’t really need one: I’m so bad about taking meds that most of my bottles still contain over half the original contents. All I needed to do was to find which bottle contained pills that looked like the ones I’d brought home.

After the fourth or fifth bottle, I found a match: Lortab.

Wouldn’t that have been a fun pill to be on accidentally while trying to homeschool my son for the rest of the day? Sure, I’d probably have wound up taking a good long nap… right before going into liver failure since Lortab contains acetaminophen, something I’m no longer allowed to take since the last time I was given the wrong medication. (Though, in fairness, that one was due to my former prescription-happy physician and not the pharmacist’s fault.)

Within minutes, I was back en route to the pharmacy again, this time too ticked off to care about the snot dripping down my upper lip or the gummy blobs forming at the inner corners of my eyes.

I shook the bottle of pills in my pharmacist’s face and asked for an explanation. Granted, I’d had a prescription for Lortab (and, come to think of it, it was issued on the same as the allergy medicine was prescribed. But that’s not the one I’d called in. Didn’t they have some kind of measure to prevent such mistakes, like bar code verification equipment or something?

I’ll say this much for the man: he remained a lot more calm than I would’ve if some red-eyed, snot-faced woman stood in front of me tapping her foot and angrily shaking a bottle of pills. He hurried to his computer and pulled up my file, then clucked to himself before disappearing in some far-off corner of the pharmacist’s area.

I could hear several voices quietly talking for a few moments before he returned, sheepish as all get-out, to explain that the clerk had simply typed in the wrong last digit on my refill. As a result, they’d processed my Lortab refill instead of my allergy meds, and — gosh! — they were sorry about that.

It’s nothing bar code verification would’ve caught. It was simple error of the human kind, not that such an explanation made me feel any better. Having finally received (and taken) the right medication should do it, though.

So would receiving that pharmacy clerk’s head on a platter, but I’m guessing that might be asking a bit much.

Thursday, September 20th, 2007, 4:30 pm   |   My Venomous Life  |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.