Written Along the Way

March is the doldrums of the calendar. The holiday season is well past us and the shininess of the New Year is feeling a lot less shiny by the time March rolls around. By the third month of the year, we’re in the grind. It’s like when you get the first scratch or dent on the new car. That’s March. It’s still early in the year, but it’s not new anymore and it’s got some dirt on it. St Patrick’s Day is a fun holiday but that’s not enough to lift up the entire month.

It’s mostly still cold and/or wet. We might get a tease of warm weather but it’s just a tease. There’s still more cold weather ahead. We’re thinking of the warmer weather, thinking of cleaning up the yard and doing new planting. Thinking of doing fun outdoor activities but we’re not really there yet. We still have to keep waiting. We still have to make it through March.

Not quite Winter, not yet Spring. It’s an in-between time. A no man’s land. It’s a grumpy little month of wanting one thing to be over and anxiously awaiting the next thing. 

This March in particular has a heightened sense of not quite one thing but not yet the next thing. This is the third March of the dark times that we call Coronamageddon. A lot of people and government agencies are acting like Covid is over. Mask mandates and other regulations have ended. Money to fund free testing, immunization and treatment for Covid is drying up. More people are out and about and less people wear masks. But Covid isn’t really over. People are still getting Covid. People are still sick and even dying. And many places still require a negative test while traveling (even if you can’t find a place to get a damn test).

Because of where this March lands in the context of Coronamageddon, it’s an even stranger in-between time. I came into 2022 with a bunch of pent up energy. I was determined to do more activities outside of the house this year one way or the other. I want to get out into the world again. Hang out with people again (ok, if I’m being honest, I really only want to hang out with a small, select group of people but they’re people that I don’t live with!). Do things, have new experiences, see new places. 

But the weather hasn’t quite caught up to my desire to do more yet and it remains to be seen if Coronamageddon has finally been subdued enough to really come close to living the way we used to without the fear of death or serious illness. So, it’s the old familiar March feeling. Not wanting to go back to the previous winter months, wanting to enjoy warmer weather but being stuck in between. That stuck, not-quite-sure-where-we’re-at feeling is exaggerated this March. It’s a blah kind of month. 

I’m ready to see what happens in April. To keep moving forward and hopefully finally break through the other side of the Coronamageddon fog that’s been smothering us. 

We forget the lessons that we learn. Constantly. We need to relearn them or at least be reminded of them. Then we must reintegrate the lesson into our lives. Then we forget it again. This is the way of it. The answer is to do something regularly to keep us tuned into these lessons and keep us grounded on the path upon which we are attempting to stride.

“Don’t take it personally” is a good lesson. It’s one that I had forgotten about. I ended 2021 with bitterness. The last few months of the year, I wasn’t just frustrated or even angry; it was worse than that. I was bitter. Fortunately, I had some time at the very end of the year to digest what had been happening and how I had been handled it. I was able to step back enough to evaluate how I was feeling and make the conscious decision that I did not like it. And I did not want to continue it or allow myself to repeat it. 

The things that I was angry about that led to my bitterness had not changed. I chose to change how I felt about those things. Bitterness and anger weren’t changing the things that were bothering me. Bitterness and anger were changing me. 

The biggest tool in making this change was remembering that I should not be taking things personally. Like all good lessons, it is so simple. It’s easy to be fooled by its simplicity. It’s easy to not take it seriously or delve deep enough into what it means because, on the surface, it sounds so obvious. But it’s deep and simple at the same time. 

When someone lashes out at me and raises their voice, speaks rudely or even calls me names, all of those things are under the control of the other person, not me. That anger, rudeness, and name calling are not mine. They are theirs. Because it’s aimed at me and because I have an ego, I feel like it’s about me. I feel hurt or disrespected. But I am choosing that hurt or disrespect. That is the part that’s under my control. 

I could remember that even though the anger is coming at me, it’s not my anger. This is not actually about me. This is about the person who is angry. In that way, I can step aside from the anger. I do not need to be angry because the person talking to me (or at me) is angry. Their anger is their business. 

When I remember that it’s not about me, it creates space and opportunity for other things to happen. It’s easier to find compassion or understanding for this angry person when I’m not feeling angry myself. It creates the internal space to continue to be the person that I am trying to be instead of just being on autopilot. 

Not taking it personally doesn’t just apply to personal interactions. All of us are tired of, frustrated by or angry about Covid by now. We feel the impact on our lives, the limitations, the fears, the fatigue, the divisiveness of it. But it’s not about any one of us. This miserable thing is happening all over the world. Covid is one of the few things that we all have in common (even if we don’t act like it). So Covid sucks and living with it sucks and living with the all the fall out from it sucks. But it doesn’t just suck for me. It’s not about just me. It’s not aimed at me. It’s just out there like the weather or gravity. It’s happening to everyone. 

The same is true for the crap we deal with at work. My employer was the biggest cause of my bitterness last year. But lots of people work for the same company. I’m not alone in dealing with these issues or thinking these thoughts or feeling these feelings. It’s not about me. Remembering to not take it personally, created some distance in how I saw my complaints. When we aren’t taking it personally, we can see it without feeling it. That makes it easier to deal with it. Are my feelings justified or am I overreacting? Is this real? Is it likely to change? What can I do? We can look at the problem and evaluate it without emotion when we stop taking it personally. 

The situation still sucks but I feel calmer about it when it’s not about me. It’s just another thing that’s come up to deal with, it’s not some personal attack. It’s not just some philosophical argument to say “don’t take it personally”. The space created between me and what’s bothering me, by not taking it personally, makes the entire view different.

But I’m going to forget this. I’m going to be on autopilot and just react with emotion to the emotions thrown at me. Or react with emotion to the crappy situation I find myself in. Unless I keep reminding myself, “Don’t take it personally”. So far this year, “Don’t take it personally” has turned into a mantra for me. I’ve been saying it to myself and repeating it to myself when necessary. as often as necessary, to keep myself from sliding back into those old ways of perceiving things and reacting to things. At the end of last year when I was evaluating how I was feeling and handling things and I remembered that I didn’t need to take things personally, I did not intend for that saying to become a mantra. But it works as one. No matter how much I prepare myself and think things through ahead of time, I still find myself on autopilot and reacting to things moment to moment. Reminding myself not to take it personally disrupts the autopilot and resets my trajectory. Instead of just reacting to what’s happening, I can stay on course.

Don’t take it personally. Try it.

How many articles or headlines have you seen over the years talking about how hard it is to make friends as an adult? Or about how men are bad at friendship? Or about how men don’t share their feelings? Or about how important it is to reach out for help and support when you’re feeling down? (Sorry ladies but the articles I see are always talking about men.) Generalizations are usually not a good idea but there’s probably some truth in there if all these articles keep popping up. 

I do think it takes more effort to make and maintain friendships as adults simply because the amount of time that we overlap with our friends is less so we have to put in the effort to make that time happen. And even if we have good friends, we are still programmed to take care of ourselves or not burden other people with our problems. Or maybe it’s a pride thing where we feel like accepting help shows weakness or incompetence or something. So, it’s harder to make friends as an adult and even if we have friends we might be reluctant to ask for help. Ok, fine. 

But there’s another side to the topic. People are reluctant to share their good news and good fortune too. People might even be more reluctant to share a success than they are to ask for help. Think about it. If you get a raise do you tell your friends? If your kid gets all A’s or has some athletic accomplishment do you tell your friends? People are afraid to share their good news because they don’t want to sound like they’re bragging. Or they don’t want to make someone else feel bad if things might not be going as well for the other person. Or they don’t want people to think they’re trying to compete with them or whatever other reasons people have for keeping quiet about the good stuff. And I’m not talking about going on Facebook and posting about good stuff. Fuck that, I’m not even discussing that. I’m talking about sharing these good events with your close friends that you spend time with and care about. I’m talking about sharing good news with the people who you would rush out the door to help if they needed you. 

This is a missed opportunity. If you already have close friends and you’re willing to help them in their time of need and even though you might not want to ask them for help you know that they would help you, then why not share and enjoy each other’s successes too? Life is full of miserableness. Yes, life is full of good stuff too (and that’s what I’m talking about). But, for real, life is full of miserableness. This is not a pain-free ride. So, why are we not leveraging these close friendships to add some more happiness and positivity into our lives?

If you care about a friend enough to be there when they need your help then you care about them enough to be excited about their success. If my friend gets a raise I’m not going to feel jealous or feel bad about my job. I’m going to be excited for them. If a friend’s child does something great, I’m not going to be bummed that it wasn’t my kid, I’m going to feel good and be proud of their child too. After all, we’re watching all these kids grow up right along with our own kids. I’m cheering for my friends’ kids almost as hard as I’m cheering for my own.  

The big lesson of being middle aged is not just that having close friendships is good for our quality of life. It’s not just that the people we have these relationships with can help pick us up when we’re down. It’s that they can lift us up higher when we aren’t down. Their joys and successes can be our joys and successes. We can get residual good vibes from their good fortunes, ride their coattails and get a little boost.

Yes, share your struggles and hard times with your friends because we all can use that help and that lift. But share the good stuff too! I want to hear about your successes and your achievements. I want that free good mood boost. I want to feel the vicarious positivity from your good times. If I’m feeling down, I can use that little boost from you and if I’m already feeling good, I can still feel better. Bring on your successes!

If we want 2022 to be different we need to leave our resentments, anger, and baggage behind. It’s arbitrary to think about resolutions and making changes at the end of December instead of at the end of some other month, but it’s what we do. We have a calendar and we mark the years so this is it. It’s a new year and we can use this arbitrary marker in time to reassess, regroup, and change directions. We can take with us from 2021 what we’ve learned and leave the bad vibes behind.

Some of this we accomplish through acceptance. I’ve had complaints about the company I work for and they’ve only multiplied over the past year. I’ve thought about these complaints and I believe they are valid. But if I keep complaining and singing the same song what can I expect to happen? Nothing helpful. All I’ll be doing is recycling and reinforcing my own negative feelings. It’s like going outside into the rain, raising our face up to the sky and screaming for the rain to stop. It won’t stop raining, you’ll still be angry and you’ll be all wet. There may be some value in venting and getting our complaints and negative feelings out but there’s a sweet spot between venting and getting stuck in that loop of complaining.

You might be frustrated or angry with how Covid continues to be handled by individuals and by government agencies. Frustrations about access to testing or how schools are handling or not handling it, but the inconsistent, sometimes illogical, way this has been handled is an old story. It’s how people and governments seem to handle everything. Leave that resentment behind.

Deal with the issue without the resentment. I can look for a new job. You can petition your government representatives to do things differently. But if we keep complaining about the same old things we are stuck. We are choosing bitterness and negativity and accomplishing nothing other than making ourselves more and more unhappy and stressed.

Let’s not take it so personally. We feel like this is all about us because we’re behind the driver’s wheel of our own journeys but it’s not about us. We just have to navigate it. When we can step back and see the things that are happening for what they are, without taking it personally, it’s easier to navigate.

We can then see all the fear and confusion, not just our own. We can see our own angry response. We might even be able to find some compassion as we see that everyone is stuck in this mess and everyone is dealing with their own fear and confusion. Turning the page on the calendar has not changed the challenges we are facing but it does provide the opportunity for us to change how we approach these challenges. 

What if everything happens exactly the way it’s supposed to? Whatever is happening is what is happening so how can anyone make an argument that it’s not supposed to be happening? 

Doesn’t it make as much sense to believe that everything is happening the way it’s supposed to as it does to believe that things are not happening the way they’re supposed to? It might make more sense to believe that things are happening the way they’re supposed to since these things that are happening are real. The idea of things happening a different way is just an idea.

What would it do to your mindset and worldview if you believed that everything was happening exactly as it was supposed to be happening? It would not take any more control away from you. You would still have to make choices and the biggest of those choices is how you choose to handle whatever it is that has just happened. 

Some events that happen are harder for us to believe they’re supposed to happen than others. My friend Mark is dead. If things unfolded the way I think they’re supposed to, I would be preparing to see him in eight days. But that is not how things are happening so how can I argue that they are supposed to be a different way. There is what is happening and there is what is not happening. What is happening is real. What is not happening is not real. It is so simple.

I am not capable of understanding that Mark dying happened the way it was supposed to happen. But I also can come up with no explanation or reason why it shouldn’t have happened that way other than that I did not want it to happen that way. I can offer no alternative scenario that is any truer because any other scenario is not the scenario that happened. 

I don’t want Mark to be dead so I act like he shouldn’t be. I didn’t want my daughter to yell this morning so I act like she shouldn’t have. I want the driver in front of me to use their turn signal so I get mad when they do not.

What is this I? Just another filter through which to experience the world. Without filters the world would be experienced for what it is. Without putting everything through the I filter, there would be a lot less drama.

Acknowledging that the way things are happening is the way they are supposed to be happening is seeing things without the veil of our own wants and desires. Just because I want something to happen does not mean it’s going to happen. You and I may want opposite outcomes. What we want is irrelevant. The only thing that really matters is what actually happens. 

If my daughter yells, I get wrapped up in not wanting her to yell. I might be disappointed or angry or frustrated. I might wonder why. I might just think to myself that I don’t want to deal with it. I might think that I’m not doing a good job teaching her or helping her because this is still happening. I might think that she isn’t doing a good job listening or trying to control herself because this is still happening. On and on it goes. Alternatively, if I assumed that however unpleasant that moment might feel, it was happening exactly as it was supposed to happen, then I would probably react differently. Instead of analyzing the why or how or getting mad or taking it personally, I might be able to just see it for what it is and handle it. She is yelling. She still needs to learn how to handle her emotions. She still needs to grow. This is an opportunity for that growth. What can I do to help her and get us through this moment? 

It is what it is and that’s all that it is. Everything else is just noise. We see it for what it is or we see it as different than what we want it to be. We set ourselves up for suffering when we act like things are not supposed to be this way. There is no fair and unfair. There is what is happening. We can see what is happening or we can focus on what is not happening. Usually we are focused on what is not happening and how much we want that to be what is happening.

“Supposed to be” is a stupid idea anyway. Why do we think things are supposed to be a certain way or that things are not supposed to be a certain way? Things just are. We get wrapped up in the idea that things aren’t supposed to be how they are because we don’t like how they are. What if we get rid of “supposed to be” and “not supposed to be” and just accept the things that are happening as they happen? We will still have an emotional response and we will still need to deal with those emotions but we won’t be sidetracked by that sense of injustice that things aren’t turning out the way they’re supposed to. We make a lot of noise with all our judgements and interpretations. It’s hard to think clearly in the midst of so much noise.

The term burnout makes it sound like the person being described didn’t have what it takes to hang in there. It sounds somehow like a judgement. It’s not a good term to describe what has been happening to people in 2021. Even resilient people can reach their limit. 2021 has been harder than 2020 for many people. When our lives were overtaken by the shadow of Corona in 2020, it was unexpected and stressful and maybe scary at times but it was also something new. There was a novelty to it. That novelty is what makes 2021 different. Not only is it not new anymore, not only is the thrill gone, but there is a sense of disappointment, a let down, that we haven’t learned more and adjusted better after this many months. And there’s this lingering, wondering “is this ever going to end?” voice in our heads.

For all the good moments, for all the things I can be grateful for, for as good as we’ve had it compared to others, I still say this has been a miserable year.

A few days ago I came home from a grinding twelve hour work day. A day in which I had been feeling really tired almost all day long due to getting a Covid booster two days before that. Within minutes of arriving at home, my daughter’s fuse was lit and burning toward explosion. These explosions occur quickly no matter what mood she was in seconds before. I had already been struggling to maintain my composure for days, weeks really, and at the end of this work day, as I was about to walk into my home, I had let down my defenses. I was running on empty. 

At first, I didn’t respond well. I was thinking about me. About how I didn’t want another challenge in my day. About how I was tired and that I should have been about to turn off and relax because now I was at home. But I caught myself before I fell too far down that line of thinking (or really not thinking, that’s autopilot). I remembered that the only way this was going to work was if I thought about her, not me. The only way it was going to work was if I could ignore how I felt and what I wanted and find compassion for her.

And once I switched directions, my intervention with her was successful. Later when my wife and I were talking and I was telling her about my day at work and the things I didn’t like about it, I finished by saying something along the lines of how even after that long, tiring day I was still able to keep it together and diffuse the bomb and be supportive to our daughter. (Yeah, I patted myself on the back)

But being there for someone else and being able to help someone else is the biggest thing keeping me going. When I was still in the garage, after arriving home from work, I was crying after reading a text message. The message had pictures, taken a few Thanksgivings ago, of a recently dead friend. I composed myself and went into the house but I was done, zero left. Then seconds later I was facing the countdown to an explosion. 

Why am I telling you this? No matter how resilient someone is, we can still be pushed to and past our limits. We can still get to the point where we feel like we have nothing left. An answer to get through and even cure our misery is to put our misery down and focus on helping someone else. That is curative. That is letting go of our ego and its worries and grievances and allowing our pure self to come out.

If you’re still with me then you may be thinking, “but you helped your daughter, someone that you love. Big deal”. And you’d be right. It’s so much harder to give our energy away to someone we don’t care about or to someone we don’t know at all. But only five days before that night, I was unable to find any compassion for my daughter in the same situation. I was so empty and so turned off that I didn’t care that she was suffering. I could only think about and feel my own suffering.

The key to diminishing our suffering is always within our reach. It’s to turn our focus to someone else’s suffering. When we find compassion for someone else, when we give our energy away, the energy that we don’t think we have, then we allow ourselves to be restored. Our physical and situational circumstances will not have changed. We will still need to address our problems and overcome our challenges but we will have traded in some of our own misery for some positive energy. When we see someone else’s pain, we allow ourselves to look past our own pain.

When we come out from under the cloud of our own negative feelings, we put our ego aside. We are releasing ourselves from the illusion that it’s all about ourselves. There’s more happening than our own pain, but if we’re so focused on our own feelings then we have no attention left to see anything else. Turn our gaze outward and we free ourselves from those clouds and can once again see the horizon.

P.S. It also helps to feel like someone other than yourself cares that you’ve been pushed past your limits. That’s getting harder to come by too as we are all having our own Coronamageddon struggles.

P.P.S. Gratitude is good. It’s a real way to see past our own circumstances and to reframe what we are dealing with. But it’s passive. Helping someone else is active and you get a bigger return on your investment.

P.P.P.S. The people who work in healthcare have daily opportunities to help other people and that’s probably what attracted a lot of people to the job to begin with. But during these times, amidst everything we have to deal with, it’s getting harder and harder to see past our own walls and care anymore about the people we’re there to help. True story. Our healthcare workers are being destroyed right now.

I’m going to tell you a story about retail pharmacy. This story will overlap and intersect other aspects of our healthcare system like insurance companies and prescribers. It will also overlap and intersect with who we are as people and as a society. Not many jobs involve interacting with such a broad cross section of people. Even other retail jobs see a smaller section of society. If you work in a restaurant or bar, not everyone likes that kind of food or goes to that type of bar and some people don’t even drink. But in pharmacy, so many people are on a daily medication. If you don’t need a daily medication, you might need a pain medication for an injury or an antibiotic if you’re sick or something prior to or after a surgery. You might come in for a vaccination or you might be coming in to pick up a medication for someone else, because even if you’re not on a daily medication there’s probably someone in your household who is.

This story starts long ago, way back when there were so fewer medications. Pharmacy was truly about the preparation and dispensing of medications and remedies. That is still part of today’s pharmacy and it’s obviously an important part because if someone doesn’t have access to the medication they need then it’s not going to help them. I call this part of pharmacy the assembly line. That’s what it is. A prescription comes to the pharmacy, one way or another, the prescription is typed, checked, and a leaflet prints with all the information to fill the prescription. The prescription gets filled and checked one more time then it’s ready for pick up. It’s an assembly line.

That is now just one of the many tasks in pharmacy. The only task in the assembly line process that requires any knowledge of medications and health care is when the pharmacist checks to see if the prescription has been entered correctly and if it makes sense. The rest of the assembly line is busy work. Because pharmacy started as an assembly line and because it’s hard to fight inertia or change the status quo, everything else in pharmacy has just landed on top of the assembly line without fundamentally changing the way pharmacy works. This is a problem.

When you call your doctor’s office, who answers the phone? Not your doctor, not a nurse and probably not even one of the medical assistants. When you call the pharmacy, who answers the phone? Could be the pharmacist and if not the pharmacist, then it’s a pharmacy technician.

When you call to schedule an appointment at your doctor’s office, who do you talk to? It’s either the receptionist or someone who deals primarily with scheduling. When you call the pharmacy to schedule something, who do you talk to? It’s the pharmacist or technician again.

When you call your doctor’s office to discuss a bill, who do you talk to? You talk to the billing department. There are people there who work exclusively with billing. When you call the pharmacy to discuss a billing question, do you talk to billing specialists? Nope, you talk to the pharmacist or technician again. 

Even if you’re not great at noticing patterns, you’ve caught onto this one by now, right? In retail pharmacy, the same people do EVERYTHING. Not only are those people expected to be good at everything but they’re expected to jump from task to task with no warning as to what’s coming next and while dealing with constant interruptions. 

Most routine shots are administered in pharmacies now. Giving a shot is easy. It’s not like drawing blood, which I’d say takes some real skill. Most immunizations are given intramuscularly and there’s nothing to it. It’s not that it’s hard to give immunizations, it’s that immunizations were just dumped onto the pharmacy assembly line. The same assembly line that is also the receptionist, the billing department, and the scheduling department. Not only do pharmacies have the extra task of immunizations, they have the task of discussing with people, counseling them, and deciding which immunizations are appropriate. 

You see, pharmacists have to follow rules. Just because “your doctor told you to get the shot” doesn’t mean you should get the shot. Doctors are treated like gods in this country. Congratulations to their lobbyists for doing a kick ass job. A doctor can prescribe any medication for any reason, even if that’s not the reason the drug was approved. But pharmacists have to follow rules. So, if it’s not appropriate to give the shot, the pharmacist can’t give you the shot. That’s not just extra work, that involves some arguing coming back at the pharmacy staff and maybe even a little bit of shit getting dumped on them. Because, remember, pharmacies are dealing with the public and everyone isn’t as polite and well-behaved as you are, dear reader. 

Pharmacy staff also tell people where the light bulbs are, where the bathrooms are and answer lots of other random questions. Pharmacy staff usually answer those questions while they’re already in the middle of talking to another person because when it’s just a little itty bitty question like “where can I find the laundry detergent?”, you shouldn’t have to wait your turn, right? It’s ok to just butt into the conversation a pharmacy staff member is already having as long as you say “excuse me”. 

< For the record, starting your question with “excuse me” does not make you polite if you’re still interrupting. >

Pharmacists are also asked to call patients and go over ALL their medications to determine if the patient still needs to be on all the meds, if everything still makes sense, if the patient has any questions or if the patient might have a condition that is not being treated. This is called a Comprehensive Medication Review. The pharmacist doesn’t go to a quiet office and close the door to make those calls. Nope, those calls are just part of the assembly line. There’s other calls that are part of the assembly line too. Calls to follow up on new medications, calls to see why someone is late to refill a medication (the medicine only helps if you remember to take it), and calls to see why we bothered to fill a medication ten days ago when you still haven’t come in to pick it up.

What else? Pharmacies don’t have an ordering department. If a pharmacy need supplies or more medication, the same pharmacists and technicians who answer the phone are responsible for placing those orders.

Oh, here’s a good one. In most retail pharmacies there is only ONE PHARMACIST ON DUTY AT A TIME. Often, that pharmacist will be the only pharmacist working from the time the pharmacy opens until the time the pharmacy closes. (What happens if the pharmacist has to poop?)

Covid has been lots of fun for everyone and pharmacy staff aren’t left out. Pharmacies get to give Covid vaccines! And even though there are a lot of headlines about the anti-vaxers, trust me when I tell you that the people who want the vaccine are just as intense as the people who do not. Only one of the Covid vaccines is a one dose shot which means for every person who gets a Covid shot, the pharmacy is really giving two shots. Twice the work, twice the fun! But wait, now there’s booster shots, triple the fun!

More vaccinations aren’t the only gift that Covid has given pharmacies. Pharmacies also administer Covid tests. Again, the tests are just thrown into the assembly line. The same people, who answer the phone and fill your prescriptions and solve your billing problem and run the cash register and give you your vaccination, are administering Covid tests. 

With the same people doing everything, what could go wrong? 

And I haven’t even told you the part of the story that explains how we fit into the rest of the health care system or the part of the story that explains how the interactions with this large cross section of the public go. The bottom line is that retail pharmacy is planted firmly in the middle of everything. Which sucks. 

Pharmacy is in the middle of you and your doctor. You are mad that we don’t have the prescription from your doctor but you aren’t at the doctor’s office. You are at the pharmacy so you yell at the pharmacy staff.

Pharmacy is in the middle of you and your insurance company. You are mad that your new prescription is not covered, but you are not at your insurance company’s office. You are at the pharmacy so you yell at the pharmacy staff.

Pharmacy is not in the middle of your doctor and your insurance company, but everyone hates insurance companies, so your doctor’s office will call the pharmacy to ask which drug is covered by the insurance. Pharmacists all know exactly which medications are covered by which insurance companies for which copay so that’s always an easy question for the pharmacist to answer right off the top of their head while they are also checking a prescription to see if it was typed correctly and telling the guy who is yelling at the counter which aisle the paper towels are in. 

It’s also really common in pharmacies for people to lose touch with reality. Have you ever been in line at a grocery store and had someone farther back in the line yell that it’s taking too long? How about at the bank? I have never experienced that, but if you work in retail pharmacy you have experienced it multiple times. There could be a dozen people all waiting outside the pharmacy counter for their medications and vaccinations and someone will come up to the counter and want to know what’s taking so long. Or the next person in line really can’t understand why it’s going to take an hour for their medication to be ready that was just sent over from the doctor’s office. “Please turn your head and observe all the other people who were here before you.” 

If the morale of the pharmacy staff hasn’t been beaten down sufficiently by everything already discussed, there’s one last thing that happens in retail pharmacy. It’s all the numbers that the corporate overlords look at and keep track of. No one up the corporate ladder will ever come into a retail pharmacy and congratulate the staff for keeping their patients safe and for having so few errors. They will ask why the phone hold time was 90 seconds. Or why only 68% of patients are signed up for text messages. 

Our American healthcare system is broken. No doubt. But while a lot of the system could just use a little tweak here and there, retail pharmacy needs to be burned down and rebuilt. The assembly line model is dysfunctional with all the extra tasks currently demanded of the pharmacy staff. The assembly line staff should not also be the receptionist, cashier, billing department, ordering department, scheduling department, and vaccination department. Retail pharmacists need to be acknowledged legally as healthcare providers who can make their own judgement calls not only because that’s what a doctorate in pharmacy program is designed to teach but also because it’s what’s already being asked of pharmacists. And maybe just be nice to the pharmacy staff and show a little respect too. Pharmacists are already in the middle of so many relationships in our healthcare system. If empowered and used properly, pharmacists can smooth out and solve so many problems on a daily basis and improve patient outcomes. But that’s not going to happen if pharmacists are stuck telling people which aisle the batteries are in.

The past three months the writing I’ve posted has been more about day to day stuff, some of it more personal and some of it broader and more general. I guess it’s just a reflection of where I’ve been at and how it’s all been unfolding. This past summer could have unfolded a few different ways and it ended up feeling even weirder and more stressful than last summer. 

Last summer the whole Covid thing was new and my joking name for it as Coronamageddon still kind of felt like a joke. But this summer, it felt like we should have better applied some of what we had learned over the past year. For it to still be happening the way it was happening, for people to be not just refusing vaccines but arguing against them and even arguing against masks and on top of that, having a more contagious variant circulating and trying to get an idea of how back to school would look…well, it was a disappointing and stressful time.  So, I wrote about that and didn’t have any big picture or single idea essays to put out there. 

What’s the point of discussing any of these bigger ideas right now anyway? This many months into Coronamageddon, it feels very much like people have made up their minds and the majority of people are dug in and staying put. People don’t want to challenge their position. They don’t want to learn and possibly change their minds. They believe what they believe and that’s that. Fuck the facts and fuck everyone else. I wasn’t going to waste my time digging into any one idea. And honestly, the rhythm of life lately hasn’t been conducive to thinking deeply into any one idea. This many months into Coronamageddon, every day is a swirled up mix of circus, chaos, and shit show with a dash of stress and despair thrown in to spice it up.

So, here’s another random mix of thoughts and ideas from the month:

 *SNAP* September’s already gone. I like hot fudge sundaes. I swear a lot. That rhymes with I care a lot. Maybe that’s why I swear so much. Your momma don’t dance and your daddy don’t rock & roll. What’s left for rebellion when old, chubby retirees are dyeing their hair blue? I’ve been tattooed and pierced since I was a teenager. It’s too late for me now. School daze. First time in 18 months for us. Great start (for us). Pliable and resilient little fuckers. What’s left to say about this pandemic and the schism in our country? People are disbelieving Covid as they’re dying from it. Bye bye. I’ll keep wearing a mask. I don’t care anymore about debt ceilings and infrastructure bills. Just give us some healthcare, reign in the CEOs, legalize drugs and leave us alone. Flu shot clinics and staffing shortages kept us busy at work. I see signs on the entrances of many businesses asking for patience due to staffing shortages. What is everyone doing that quit their jobs? Don’t they have rent or a mortgage payment due?

I imagine that in meditation, it’s like I’m sitting on the shore of a river, watching myself and everything else float by…the way that in our daily lives we can separate ourselves from our ego, creating distance, and let the emotions, annoyances, & frustrations that come up throughout the day just float by. We don’t have to hold on to the emotions/annoyances/frustrations and carry them with us like luggage on the journey of the day. We can put them down or let them go and the river will keep moving along and we can just deal with what we need to deal with and continue with our day.