Own worst enemy

We’re currently being trialled on some medication to see if it can assist in reducing the anxiety that we have fairly constantly.  This in itself isn’t a bad thing – reducing anxiety is good.  What is a problem, is that the psychiatrist who has prescribed the medication has put it on closed control dispensing because we’re considered a suicide risk.  This means that we have to go pick-up the medication weekly.  Normally this isn’t a problem.  But last week they didn’t have enough pills to fill the prescription so told us we had to come back in a couple of days when they’d been resupplied.  Again, this wasn’t a problem.  We thought that we’d be able to just go in when the current meds finished and pick up the ones owed and the new weeks medication – it was their error for not having enough supplies on site, so we didn’t see the big deal.  Well apparently it DID matter…

1. Initially they were just going to give us the new weeks worth of medication.
2. We stupidly asked for the balance of last weeks medication.
3. Pharmacist went back to the computer to check what the balance was about.
4. She brought out the 1.5 days of medication that was the balance from last week.
5. We asked for the new weeks as well – we didn’t want to have to waste more petrol by coming back in two days.
6. Then they started on about the closed control dispensing and not being able to give the medication early, or more than a weeks worth at any one time.
7. We questioned the validity of this statement considering they were about to give us the weeks worth two days early just a few minutes ago, and it was only when we asked about the balance that this became an issue.
8. They again talked about closed control and brought out the original prescription notes from the psychiatrist.
9. We agreed that it was closed control, however it was not our fault that they couldn’t control their stock levels.
10. They talked about not being their fault and that they couldn’t not fill other peoples medication just because we might come in.

By this point we were more than a little unimpressed.  We haven’t attempted suicide in nearly a year.  Closed control is pointless – we’re librarians, we could find a recipe online easily that didn’t include taking this medication.  This medication isn’t working, so we’re jumping through hoops to obtain a medication that is doing nothing – but we need to keep taking it until we see the psychiatrist again.  At least we’re having no side effects…

After much discussion, we walked out of the pharmacy with the weeks worth of medication and the assurance from the pharmacy that they were going to call the psychiatrist to tell him that we’d come in early to pick-up the medication.  We asked if they were also going to inform him that the reason why we had to pick-up the medication early was because of their stock issues.  We were assured they would.  Doubting whether it happened…

What we found really interesting about the whole interaction is that the pharmacists immediately thought that we were saying that other peoples prescriptions shouldn’t have been filled because we were more important.  They didn’t seem to understand that we were questioning their ability to manage their own medicine stock levels.  I would hope that they gave the medication to the other people.  Again our inability to carry out basic communication.

I sometimes wonder if we get mixed up because of the internal conversations that occur.  I wonder if we forget or don’t realise that something that has been discussed internally has yet to be verbalised to the external world??

As a separate issue, we created the clip One year on… We are worried about making it live because the friend who has been strange with us, might get hurt by it.  Really annoyed with ourselves that we are changing things we should be happy about because of him.

We are our own worst enemy at times…