My Recent Trip To The Pharmacy

     If you're like me, you make a lot of trips to the pharmacy each month.  I would like to talk to you guys a little bit about what happened to me at The Wal-Mart Pharmacy.
    But before I tell you about that,  I would like to tell you a little story about how I do my medications.  What I do is put seven days worth of medication off to the side, and leave the rest of the bottle out.  I do this with all my medications.  I open the bottles up everytime I take my medication.  Day or night.  Count them,and make sure they're all there before I take them.  Well, to the best of my knowledge this is what happened to me at my local Wal-Mart Pharmacy:  Anyway, here goes.
     When I first started using theWal-Mart Pharmacy I received a prescription that I was no longer using, and that I had not called in.  So I asked the people at the pharmacy if they would fill only the prescritions that I had personally called in myself.  Even if they were called in by a doctor, or were dropped off at the pharmacy in paper form, they were supposed to be kept on file until I called in and asked for them to be filled.  They areed I could do that.
     Then recently, I dropped some hand written prescriptions off at the Wal-Mart that had been prescribed by my Psychiatrist.  Basically, I thought that they would hold them on file for me to be filled when I called for them.  Well, some of them were refilled even though I hadn't asked for them.  So some of the prescriptions that I didn't want to be filled were filled and picked up.  I just decided to let it be, and enstead of going to another pharmacy I woul just acccept what was given to me even though it would affect the number of prescription that I could pick up at one time.  Thus, increasing my number of trips th the pharmacy.  It also made it difficult for me to organize these prescriptions when I had tree bottlles of pills of the same prescription lying around the house.
     After that, I decided to request some other prescriptions that still had a few days left before they needed to be ordered thinking that since they filled the other medications when they weren't necessarily ready to be filled that they might fill these other prescritions also.  Leaving me the ability to pick up more  prescriptions at one time, minimizing the number of trips I had to make to the pharmacy.    
     Once again, I started calling in prescription numbers to be refilled.  My cell phone was getting calls from Wal-Mart Pharmacy's automated phone system letting me know that there were prescriptions that were ready to be picked up.  When we were able to get to the pharmacy they only had two prescriptions ready fro me, and I was expecting four.  They said the rest were too soon to be refilled at the time, but whe I checked my pharmacy account using the Wal-Mart Pharmacy web site the next day, they had several prescriptions listed as being ready to be picked up.  I called the pharmacy to check and see what precriptions were ready to be picked up.  She said one.  I asked her to let me know when I should come in.  She told me I would have four ready to be picked up on Saturday.  It was like DeJaVu all over again.
     That's when I felt like the Wal-Mart Pharmacy was making me worry if I was ever going to get any prescriptions at all.
     They had said that I needed to stop requesting prescription refills before it was ready to be filled.  But the thing was, at first, they filled prescriptions that I hadn't requested because I no longer used the medication.  Second, they filled prescriptions that I hadn't called in, and requested.  And third, they started telling me that prescriptions were going to be able to be picked up on a certain day, and when we got there only part of the order was ready.
Kurt