Show just a little responsiblity...

Let me pose this question to my few readers out there:

If you were leaving to go on vacation Saturday, and you knew your blood pressure medication did not have any refills, would you wait until Friday night at 7:00 PM before even checking with the pharmacy to see if your doctor refilled it?

I can hear all of you out there screaming out "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" Of course, you wouldn't wait that long. You'd have to be a complete idiot to do that.

Well, 3 separate customers today came in with this problem. The kicker was when a woman came to the pharmacy at 7:00 PM today saying she was leaving for vacation tomorrow morning. She had called in her refill using the touchtone refill line on Wednesday. Since her prescription had no refills, the automated voice told her the pharmacy would try to contact her doctor to get refills approved. From the time she hung up the phone until 7:00 PM on Friday night, she made no other contact with the pharmacy or her doctor's office to see if her medication was ready.

Genius-lady fully expected her medication to be ready and waiting for her when she arrived at the pharmacy. When we told her that her doctor never had yet to approve the refill, she got pissed off at US. She asked if we had really faxed the request. We showed her that we not only faxed it, but faxed it on both Wednesday and Thursday with no response. Did she get angry at her doctor's office for taking so damn long to approve her refill??? Of course not. She got even more pissed at us that we didn't go out of our way to call her doctor and get the approval by phone.

Listen... We fill close to 3,000 prescriptions per week. Every single day, we fax in the vicinity of 70 refills requests to doctor's offices. There's no well in holy hell we can give each and every one of those requests our diligent, personal attention. I know it may come as a shock to you, but we don't fax your refill request and then stand in front of the fax machine just waiting to get the approval faxed back to us. We fax it, mark that we faxed it, and then forget about it.

Moreover, shit-for-brains never even informed us or her doctor's office that she was leaving for vacation in a few days. Had she called us and let us know we needed to have the approval in a certain time span, we probably would have paid a little more attention to it. If she decided to let her doctor's office know about it, maybe they would have approved it in a timely manner. No... the dumbass just assumed it would be done.

I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, but if I was leaving on vacation, and I was due for a refill on my blood pressure medication that had no refills on it, I would have started calling both my doctor and the pharmacy on Monday before leaving on Saturday. I would have called both the doctor and pharmacy every single day (maybe multiple times per day) until the refill was approved. I would have taken some personal responsibility and not just trusted MY MEDICATION in the hands of others.

Again... maybe I'm just crazy.