Pharmacy Catch-22

[livingdeb]

Today I decided to make an appointment for my annual physical and to figure out what I am supposed to do about my prescription problem. My prescription problem is that each year, at my annual physical, I get a prescription for 12 lunar months but a year is much closer to 13 lunar months. It's annoying.

Normally the pharmacy will agree to call the doctor to get permission to sell one more month's worth. This year I am using a mail-order pharmacy service. My last three-month refill came with the note "NO REFILLS REMAIN. Call your doctor at [phone number] for a new prescription."

So I called my doctor's office and they said I have to have the pharmacy call them. I said I use a mail-order pharmacy and asked whether the same procedure works with them. The answer was yes, the pharmacy would send them a fax. Also, sometimes the paper work seems to take a long time, so it was recommended that I do this two months in advance. Oops, I only have five weeks.

Well, maybe I could just set my appointment for within the next five weeks. No. No openings for two months. I know I have to call early, but I keep forgetting how early. The appointment lady asked if I would still be on the same insurance plan as I was last time. I said not by September, I won't. She said that was okay.

So I went to my pharmacy's website and according to them I cannot use it for prescription information because I have probably blocked pop-up windows.

So I called the pharmacy and went through the whole process and they concluded that it is too soon to refill my prescription and I cannot do so until July 24. Funny.

So I went through the whole process again, listening for any opportunities to talk to a person. I tried that trick of waiting and not making any choices so that they will give me some more choices, but they don't. They just say that the choice I made was invalid.

So then I pressed "0" in case that would work and it did. The prescription lady said she could not call my doctor but could send a fax. I said that would be good. She asked what my doctor's fax number was. Brother.

I found it. She said the fax would be there within 5 minutes. I asked how to pay for the prescription. She sort of implied that they could use the credit card I have on file, but I suspect from the way she answered me that I am instead on the road to accidentally not paying for it because they won't ask me to until many months later when they report me to the credit bureau. Normally I would never suspect such a thing, but that was how I paid for my first three lunar months. So I'm going to have to keep an eye on this.

Web site of the day - Smitten Kitchen. This is a food blog with exquisite mouth-watering images; wonderful rambling--ahem--personable descriptions; recipes; and recipe hints. Plus there are lots of comments by readers who have actually tried the recipes and have additional hints.

My introduction to this site was this entry on no-knead bread. "Look, just make this bread, okay? It's dense and chewy, but unbelievably moist. The crust is crisp but not leathery, you don't need to gnash your teeth and injure your gums to get through it. The loaf rivals even the most exciting results of my fifteen hours of bread-baking classes.... This is why the bread is so vastly superior to other loaves: one, it has a very wet, sticky dough. Yeast loves this; it's the ideal environment for it to invade and multiply. But, breads this wet are nearly impossible to knead - it's more like smearing dough across the counter, doable, but not very pleasant."

Comments

[indigo-rose99.livejournal.com]

It's worse if the prescription is a bit older -- something you only need to refill every few years. The pharmacy no longer had a record of the prescription at all, and needed a copy of it before they would bug my doctor. My doctor would allow allow contact from the pharmacy to consider refilling it. It took weeks. I swear I lost a layer of tooth enamel.

This should obviously be a new curse:

I wanted to shorten "May you spend your days trying to order refills on a expired prescription from a doctor who will only refill it after seeing you and only has openings in four months."

Or "May your doctor and pharmacy continue to argue about the insurance that is holding up your prescription."

Or "May your doctor be too busy to see or talk to you, may your pharmacy require personal doctor contact, may your prescription say NO REFILLS, CONTACT YOUR DOCTOR, and may your condition without the drug be Very Uncomfortable."

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Yikes!