I thought this was going to be a two-part post but it seems it’s going to be three parts.
After not being able to pick up my prescription from the pharmacy on Tuesday night, I started calling the doctor’s office on Wednesday morning. The first time, I left a two-minute message with the administrative assistant’s voicemail. When I hadn’t heard back by Wednesday afternoon, I called again. This time the I tried the appointment line. As soon as I reached a human and said, “Hi, I’m having a problem with my prescription–” they forwarded me to the front desk of the doctor’s office.
There, the phone rang endlessly with no answer. Later that afternoon, I called the appointment line again, was transferred again, and left a message with the receptionist (she assured me that the doctor would call me back by the end of the day…)
I foolishly hoped that having left messages in two places, someone would indeed call me back by the end of the day or by Thursday morning. Hope springs eternal! I had 50 mg of generic Zoloft left, 1/3 of my usual dose, that I took Wednesday morning.
On Thursday, I called the doctor’s office six times. I left a message on the administrative assistant’s voicemail again. I called the appointment line and was transferred to the front desk again, where I spoke to a different receptionist who assured me…that the doctor would call me back by the end of the day. I called the appointment line at the end of the day and was transferred to the nurse’s station, where the phone rang 26 times before I hung up.
Thursday evening I talked to a friend who is a pharmacist, who told me to go to my usual pharmacy–not the typhoid-vaccine pharmacy where my prescription was mistakenly sent–and that they should give me a week’s worth of sertraline for free. “This is a generic drug that literally costs pennies,” he said, “and it’s not a controlled substance. There’s no reason they shouldn’t give it to you.”
On Friday morning, I called the doctor’s office again. I recounted the messages I’d left and the people I had talked to on Wednesday and Thursday. I said I had screenshots (true) from my online patient portal showing that my prescription was noted as 150 mg/day back in my August and December visit summaries, then disappeared for no apparent reason, then reappeared as 100 mg/day in later appointment summaries.
(No one was particularly interested in hearing about my screenshots).
All that the appointment line could do for me–understandably–was give me a doctor’s appointment. For Monday morning. “What am I supposed to do until then?” I asked. “Honestly, I don’t know. There’s nothing else I can do for you. This is a call center. Have you tried sending a message to the doctor who wrote the prescription? You can send her a message through your patient portal.” “I can’t send her a message because I’ve never actually met her…she wrote the prescription, but she isn’t my doctor, so she isn’t listed in my contacts on the portal…”
We both threw up our hands and hung up, basically.
After that, thinking that at least I’d have this issue fixed by Monday, I went to my normal pharmacy to ask if they could give me six pills to get me through Monday/Tuesday, since I had now not taken Zoloft for three days and was starting to get the brain-pulsing feeling of withdrawal.
My regular pharmacy looked into their database and saw that, yep, I had been filling my 150 mg/day Zoloft/sertraline prescription there for the past two years…but “We can’t give you any extra pills because we aren’t the last pharmacy that filled the prescription.”
“But…the pharmacy that filled it won’t give me any extra because they aren’t my regular pharmacy, so they don’t know me, and all their records say is that I take 100 mg/day.”
“Well, that pharmacy didn’t do right by you. They should have given you extra pills.”
This would become the recurring theme–“such an such other person really did wrong by you…but unfortunately, MY hands are tied.”
To be continued…
