Responsibility And Trust

ME: With whom do you trust your most important life decisions?
CP: Both of you.
MICE ELF: Pretty brave of you.
ME: Yeah. We could just shut off your life support to claim the life insurance and abscond with the profits of being locked up in your head all these years.
CP: Think about the short-sightedness of that for a moment.
MICE ELF: Damn.
CP: Although you must have been reading my mind lately.
ME: Why's that?
CP: It truly amazes me how many people entrust such a critical task to a person they barely know; how many people will send literally ANYone to retrieve their prescriptions for them or, more importantly, a child of theirs. They treat it as a random task like grabbing a gallon of milk or picking out a card on their way to visit.
MICE ELF: You're saying that picking up a prescription is more important than randomly selecting a funny card for everyone to sign for a coworker on her promotion?
CP: In so many words, yes.
ME: I agree. How many times have we been faced with a scripter-picker-upper dolt (SPUD) who simply shrugs and says "I don't know. I was just told to pick it up on my way over."? or "It's not for me." or, worse yet, "No clue. It's my new girlfriend's kid(s)."?
MICE ELF: Nice choice of mate there, ma'am.
CP: Yes. Please know that when you choose someone to pick up your prescriptions, you are giving them authority and control over decisions that affect your life.
ME: What if we have a counsel about an interaction? A new therapy? A replacement therapy? Or an allergy? *
CP: The person in front of us just shrugs like he's the UPS guy and we just asked him "what's in the box?". **
ME: I love that movie!
MICE ELF: "What's in the box?"
CP: Moving on. . . the result can be equally disastrous. Someone could die because the SPUD in charge of the healthcare information dissemination and decision-making is woefully inept, unprepared, or cares less than the patient who charged him with this task. Let's summarize.
ME: People treat their life-saving medications like a pizza or beer run.
MICE ELF: They assign it to people who don't have the answers to the questions we have for them.
CP: We are relying on these errand SPUDs to make and/or convey important healthcare information to the patient/caregiver when they make the delivery.
ME: Hoping they made the correct decision to pick up both strengths, the old refill, the old and new therapy, the interacting combo, or the long-discontinued therapy that somehow the computer deemed needed refilled.
CP: Or, wasn't needed to be filled but another patient entered her number incorrectly and this patient's medication got filled instead. (It's happened.)
MICE ELF: Good one. And let's hope that the worst thing that happens is the patient yells at us for filling/sending something home with their SPUD they no longer take and demand a refund.
CP: In which case I get to take the call and chastise them for their choice of errand SPUD. These are not decisions to be made lightly. These are medications that can and do affect your life and its quality. Either you care enough to send a competent person to take care of your health or you choose the person you trust just enough to pick out which crappy beer to share with your pie. ***
ME: It's like the joke about the husband who leaves this message for his wife: "The gyna colleges called and said Pabst beer is good. I didn't know you liked beer".
MICE ELF: True, but she at least received the message. I was thinking of Spike from Notting Hill. "You want me to write down all your messages?. . . Nope. Gone completely. . . If we're going for this obsessive writing down all the message. . . "
CP: "I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy," hoping he can deliver the correct message.
ME: I see what you did there.

*could we call? sure, and maybe we did, but the in-person visit is the one guarantee that we will see you. if you don't come in for it, there's no drug interaction, allergy, or other reaction to worry about and the counsel is moot when we delete the rx. relying on a randomly picked stranger, new fling, or flatmate to relay critical information at all, let alone correctly, is high-risk behaviour.
**can we write a note on the bag? sure. we can do this whole "can I?" thing all day. I could even drive each individual rx to each patient myself along with a counsel note if I can't reach them by phone or in-person but maybe they're not home. I can't be responsible for how people choose to live their lives. I can, however, explain how people should show more concern for their own lives than I do for them.
***my concern for your health is directly proportional to the amount of concern YOU have for it.)