vyvanse prescription has been delayed for 3 weeks now. i am a patient, yet severely ADHD soul, so I figure “oh it’s probably just delayed because they’re out of stock” and go about my business since I had about a week left (thanks to me completely forgetting to take it like 30% of the time).
wake up this morning and realize I am taking the last one I have. Not good, I think, because next week is especially busy at work. So I take an early lunch break at 9:30 and drive out to Walgreens to see if maybe, somehow, I’ve just completely missed the “your prescription’s ready” call and texts.
Pharmacist asks me what I’m looking for. “My vyvanse prescription, it was placed on the 24th. My name is ABC and DOB is…”
Tappity-tap-tap on their computer. They glance up and narrow their eyes at me like I’m asking them to hack into the NSA’s secure amphetamine database. Tappity-tap-tap.
“You’re picking up a vyvanse prescription?? For whom??”
Uh, myself…? Here’s my license.
“Hm…I’m not finding it, let me ask the head pharmacist to take a look.”
30 minutes go by. The Head Pharmacist finally comes out and asks for my license for the second time. “The other pharmacist literally copied it down on the clipboard before they went to find you.” I say as I fish it out of my wallet. They blink and look at the clipboard.
“Oh…huh. You’re right they did.”
Now I’m somewhat irritated as I hand them my license again. He looks at it, realizes it is exactly the same as what the sheet says, and hands it back to me.
“So umm…it looks like the generic lisdexamfetamine is backordered which is why we haven’t filled it yet.”
This wouldn’t be a shock except for the fact that I don’t get the fucking generic. So immediately my response is “Well, my insurance covers the brandname 100% and I don’t even get the generic so…are you saying the brand-name is also backordered and you cannot fill it??”
“No, we can fill it if you want the brand name medication!!”
“So why did y’all not fill it for 3 weeks if literally every other time I’ve filled this prescription through you, I’ve received the brand name medication??”
“…Because the generic is back-ordered sir…”
??? What the fuck are you talking about. It sounds like you just tossed my prescription into the “backordered” pile whenever it came in and didn’t realize it wasn’t actually a backordered medication until I came in. Thank you for wasting my entire hour lunch-break!!
Try not giving Walgreen’s any business if there are any locally owned pharmacies in your area.
any locally owned pharmacies in your area
there is & I would normally but the locally owned one nearby has an owner who is a POS and hires pharmacy techs who’ll do things like steal thousands of dollars from their girlfriend or (different tech but still) loudly ask you how you’re enjoying the trazodone and if I think its helping with my depression, which no it isn’t when you’re announcing to the entire line of strangers/small town acquaintances behind me that there’s a depressed ADHD twink at the counter; so all in all despite its shittiness Walgreens is the superior choice.
Still better than waiting an hour for your scrip at walgreens + you can threaten a hipaa suit if they don’t shutup
Unfortunately, HIPAA doesnt have a private right of action. All you can do is file a complaint with DHS.
What the fuck
Lmao its almost like everyone that owns a business is a piece of shit.
I had to go to my pharmacist four times because they said I didn’t have a receipt .
Turns out they did, I had just mixed up the brand name with the medicine name. My mistake, except not really because the first time I came in I said I was there to pick up a receipt, they asked which, I told them the one that was IN THEIR FUCKING SYSTEM ORDERED BY MY PSYCHIATRIST, they asked me to be more specific, so I told them “the medicine for my ADHD” and they asked me to be more specific so I told them [brand name] and he told me they didn’t have a receipt for that drug in my name. Weird. I go to my doctor, I ask my doctor “hey the receipt isn’t out, would you send it out?” Doctor checks, the receipt is out. I go to pharmacy, we repeat the process, they say there isn’t a receipt for me for that drug (and again I start out by saying there’s a receipt for some ADHD medication, not [name brand drug]).Now I wanna make this clear: I live in a country where this system is digital. Doctor writes into a computer “yes this person should get this medicine”. You show up, you say you’re there to pick up medicine, you show id, you pay for medicine, you leave. That’s it. All you as an individual has to know is that there’s a receipt for you.
This colossal dickhead suddenly decided he had to make his own weird little routine where I had to be able to name THE SPECIFIC CHEMICAL STRUCTURE/MEDICINE NAME. You don’t even have to know what you’re taking your medicine for, but he decided you did, so I went a fucking month without my medication.I went thru this thing two more times, until on the fourth visit, the educated individual behind the counter thought to ask if I was okay with any brand, since the DOCTORS RECEIPT TO WHICH I HAD ORIGINALLY REFERRED THEM TO didn’t specify a brand.
He then chose to chide me for mixing up brand and medicine.
I hope he spends some time in a warm place where nasty people poke him with prods until he can recite the medicinal name of every drug he had in his inventory.Now I’m not a pharmacist, but I am an expert in another field. When I interact with people that aren’t experts in that field, I assume they won’t know anything beyond what is immediately apparent to them and anything beyond that is a pleasant surprise to me. Apparently pharmacists are taught to assume everyone knows what they know.
Shut the fuck up and give me my goddamned drugs you reptile.
Luckily I have a stem degree in a related field, so if these assholes ever try this on me I’m not gonna just say Ritalin or Methylphenidate or even Methyl-2-phenyl-2-(piperidin-2-yl) acetate. I’m gonna start asking him to give me the Hartree-Fock results for the structure of the money I’m supposed to give him
Sorry you had to deal with that :(
I hate hate hate dealing with medical bureaucracy, everything takes so long and working with it is made even more difficult than usual if you have ADHD
It’s not my revolution unless we have over-the-counter amphetamines
If you want pharmacy techs to do a better job, they need to be paid more
This is true of every profession, except some of them also ruin people’s fucking lives and it isn’t an excuse.
“Cops need to be paid more if you don’t want them shooting innocent people.” ass take.
Cops are paid to be class traitors, and no increases in salary or training will change that. Pharmacy techs are not.
Corporations take advantage of pharmacy techs putting their desire to not ruin peoples’ lives above the fact that they’re not being paid enough to care, that is not a struggle that they share with pigs.
While policing definitely selects for already shit people, if you want to argue the case that cops at no point ever had any ideas about helping people only to be harassed by their peers and bosses, have their spirits crushed and be propagandized into conforming with the structural racist and class wafare mission of “policing” in the United States, go right ahead… or you can realize that that’s the EXACT same situation pharmacists are in. They’re literally trained to uphold the exact same racist and class based order, and police people away from assistance (medicatIon, in this case) that cops do with access to so many other rights.
I’m sure plenty of pharmacists do want to help people, and I’m plenty aware that the the structure that controls them keeps them on an extremely tight leash about who that help can go to. Just like cops. The reason people say ACAB and “good cops quit” is precisely because they know there’s occasionally good people who wind up in the line of work who immediately realize how fucked it is and try and fix it only to get their lives ruined or wind up dead themselves, or be forced to quit.
None of this is even to defend cops, it’s to illustrate that every single argument you’ve made for pharmacists is true of cops too, as well as almost every single other profession, and that when the pharmacist accusing you of selling drugs because you’re an adult with ADHD, or asking “why you need so many” or “this is an odd dose” or all the other shit they literally should take up with a doctor but won’t because they’ll get sat the fuck down immediately, so they instead harass the patient, that they’re not doing it because “they want to help people but their hands are tied.” Maybe that was true at one point, but at that current point they’re a fucking cop and fucking people over just because they can. When they “accidentally forget to order your prescription” that you’ve been getting the same dose of every month on the same date at the same place for 3+ years, month after month after month, they’re not “trying their best, but just underpaid”.
They’re not special, they’re not exceptions, they’re not unique. They’re in the exact same situation everyone else is, and it’s perfectly fine to call them pieces of shit for acting like it.
Please just re-analyze a bit and think about it.
(P.S. I’m not saying when the companies who own these pharmacies etc push these policies they’re always doing them out of an out and out conscious racist or class based purpose, but cops don’t think they are either. It’s all culture and “business policies” made by extremely normal ceo failsons and board members, handed down to be enforced by the poor against the poor, sanitized through industry appropriate language and coding. It just so happens that in policework being outwardly mask off racist is industry appropriate, because the “white” public literally supports it most of the time.)
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Sir this is an opioid mill
I don’t think intelligence comes into it very much. From what I’ve seen, the norm is, especially in metropolitan areas, pharmacists are overworked, underpaid, understaffed, don’t get enough sleep, are constantly treated like shit by customers (who, to be fair sometimes have a valid reason to be upset, since it’s medicine and not just some random treats).
I agree with this, but as someone with ADHD who needs it to perform my fucking job, I am also all of these things except also untreated for ADHD because someone else also isn’t doing their job to even basic competency. Like I know there’s a million zillion reasons it sucks but those are never the reasons we’re given. The reasons we’re given day in day out are “well, we fucked up and here’s an excuse that doesn’t even make sense.”
If we push back on those reasons AT ALL we’re instantly treated like medication seeking strung out addicts who are angry because they can’t get their street drugs that they probably give away for free to babies to get them hooked and dependent on drugs while putting razor blades in their candy or whatever the the fucking news fed WASP stereotype is.
It’s not about being annoyed that sometimes mistakes happen and people are generally treated like shit as laborers, including pharmacists. I’ve never met an ADHD person who doesn’t understand that the systems are shit, the regulations are shit, the wages and staffing is shit, etc. What we don’t understand and what’s so frustrating is why the fuck they simultaneously think the words they’re saying are even consistent (if not valid) excuses, and why the fuck we’re treated like shit (which again, even if we were addicts is a piss poor way to treat people, but that’s a separate argument). It’s not a single event. It’s every single pharmacy, every single pharmacist, every single prescription, with VERY RARE exceptions.
Being someone that’s also got friends and family taking BPD meds, anti-depressants, etc, even they think it’s absurd how hard it is to fill an ADHD prescription compared to literally everything they take. The entire medical attitude towards ADHD is fucking toxic.
Edit: Just to add because I think it’s important, I know literally none of this is their fault and is entirely the result of shit policies, shit circumstances, and shitloads of propaganda. I know they’re mostly now just retail employees, none of the above is ever any reason to treat them like shit either. I was just defending OPs rant that I am overwhelmingly sure they came here to have instead of being annoyed at the pharmacist, because if they had it at the pharmacy they’d have included “and now my life is basically a million times harder because they decided the minute I was agitated that I was never allowed to take a controlled substance again.”
preach it
I don’t know if pharmacists are dumb, but they are certainly often fucking assholes and deliberately neglectful to certain patients. Yeah most people have good experiences with pharmacists for most things, but if you need a controlled substance they instantly transform into cops and start treating you like a criminal. They’re not quite as bad about this as doctors, but wow can they be real pieces of shit.
You’ve ever been on the r/pharmacy subreddit? Maybe this is just the intersection of
and pharmacists, but they often actively delight in “sticking it to the junkies”. They love pretending to just be your run of the mill abused retail employee when patients get upset that they’re about to have their ability to live a functional life totally obliterated, often on top of torturous withdrawals.Pharmacy is under a lot of the same pressure as the rest of the medical profession, which is to say that they’re understaffed, underpaid, overworked, and burnt out. It doesn’t surprise me that they’re starting to fail to meet basic standards. That’s not to say it’s acceptable that you can’t get your medication, just that you’re probably not the only one, and it’s likely not limited to that pharmacy.
Just had to call the pharmacy because they “couldn’t” refill my Adderall prescription due to some unexplained to me issue but when I called they just said they’d get started on filling it. And now it says it’ll be ready later today. It’s frustrating but every time I go to pick up it’s clear they’re incredibly understaffed.
They do tend to be overly dense, like they’re doing it on purpose, always chalked it down to corporate training
Maybe its all the fluorescent lighting.
Yea, pharmacist love to be cops about vyvanse. I hate it
The only pharmacist I know spent college self medicating with cocaine and research chemicals from the internet.
In his defense, he was always willing to share.
Tell me if this is a scorching hot take
But I’m starting to believe that some of the super rich kids in med, pharmacy, veterinary, dentistry and orthodontics programs made it through said program because they were rich or were charismatic
Hopefully just outliers, but I’ve had two known instances of people who were dentists that definitely shouldn’t have passed dental school.
But even so, shouldn’t even be possible for schooling like that allow people to slip through the cracks
It’s a bit more complex than that. It’s more if you are rich and you can’t pass, they will drill you until you can. By force-feeding information to the failsons and handwalking them through the tests regardless of the required resources.
That’s why dropout rates at Oxbridge et al are relatively low compared to “new money” top-tier universities. They will get Mr Habsburg Chin through enough exams to scrape a third if it kills every teacher in the College.
Cold take. The modern professional only got there with family resources or some other form of privilege for the most part.
Sorry to hear about your troubles comrade. I hope you’re doing well with your medication now.
To give the pharmacist the benefit of the doubt, maybe their main failing was not being able to articulate some sort of byzantine corporate policy. Having worked retail, I always assume that any completely irrational fuck up came from corporate than the worker standing in front of me.
That being said, the only pharmacist I know personally lost his license and went to jail for defrauding the government with fake prescriptions, so idk maybe the profession is just rotten.
Pharmacy is incredibly grim, these poor workers spent years and thousands of dollars to study to work in corpo retail for low pay
My parent got their bag stolen once like 20 years ago now and the thing they always say was the worst part was getting their prescriptions refilled. Not replacing the credit cards or the ids, not the hundred or so in cash that they were out…
I don’t even know if there is such a thing as trafficking blood pressure and diabetes medication.
