Aaron's Prescription Saga

The story that I am about to tell you is real. The names of the characters have NOT been changed, as they have caused me so much mental anguish over the last two weeks that I am going to out them like a snotty five year old who didn’t get her way at recess. And so it goes a little something like this…

A week and four days ago, I scheduled Aaron to see his pediatrician to discuss the fact that he is still having throat issues and sometimes his voice gets really hoarse. I love his pediatrician. There is no one out there like this guy. I would believe that monkeys can fly if he told me that they could because he knows THAT much about EVERYTHING. He’s awesome.

Anyway…

He agreed that this has been going on for too long now and that we need to treat it. His best guess is that Aaron has reflux and he wasn’t surprised that the barium swallow test that he had done back in March didn’t show this because it isn’t something that happens every time that a person eats and so the chance of actually catching it during the test is rare. He prescribed Prevacid, told me to give it two months, and then take him off of it. If it goes away then yippee, and if not then he may just have to be on the antacid for a while, no biggie. We walked out of the office, prescription in hand, happy with another successful visit with Dr. All-Knowing.

This was a Wednesday.

Now here’s where things start to go downhill. The next day I took the prescription down to our local Wal Mart pharmacy to have it filled. We dropped it off at the drive-thru and went across the street to have an ice cream cone while we waited. A half an hour later, we used about half a pack of baby wipes to get Elyse to a state that I could actually put her back in the van without getting ice cream all over the place and we skipped back over to Wal Mart to get the prescription.

Me: (Pushed the little call button in the drive-thru)
Pharmacy Lady: Can I help you?
Me: Yeah, I’m picking up a prescription for Aaron.
Pharmacy Lady: Birth date?
Me: 1/11/05
Pharmacy Lady: Ok, that’ll be one hundred and something or other dollars.
Me: Um, oh no it won’t.

Our insurance doesn’t cover name brands, so I asked if there was a generic available. Pharmacy Lady went to check and when she came back she said that there was a generic, but it was a pill that Aaron would have to swallow. It doesn’t dissolve like the Prevacid would have. So I told her to disregard that prescription and that I would have to call the doctor’s office for something else.

And so I did.

At the end of the day on Friday, I got a call from the pediatrician’s office and the girl told me that she called in a new prescription. Everything was taken care of. Great! We were super busy that Saturday, so we didn’t make it to Wal Mart until Sunday, Father’s Day. The fact that it was Father’s Day has absolutely no significance to the story, but I thought I would mention it anyhow. Mike and Aaron went to get the prescription while I took Elyse to pick out bedding for her big girl bed. Yes, we finally made the transition to put Elyse into a toddler bed, but that is a whole other story in itself.

So Mike and Aaron found Elyse and me and said that the pharmacy didn’t have anything for Aaron. Well what the crap? The girl said on Friday that everything was taken care of. I guess I am going to have to call the doctor…AGAIN!

But I didn’t call on Monday because we had an out of town trip to the zoo planned. So first thing Tuesday morning I made the call…again…because calling the doctor every other day is my idea of a good time. I nicely explained that there must be some kind of miscommunication because the pharmacy doesn’t have the prescription. She was super nice and said that she would take care of it and call me right back. I took the kids to bible camp and waited for the call.

Right at 10:00 AM I got the call that all was right with the world and Wal Mart now had the prescription. I stood up and shouted, “Halleluiah!!” and since I was at bible camp, I got a rousing, “Amen!!”

Now, even though the nice lady said that Wal Mart had the prescription and everything was taken care of, I was a bit skeptical. So before I made yet another trek for medication that wasn’t there I called Wal Mart to confirm that there was in fact something there with Aaron’s name on it waiting to be picked up.

Me: Hi, I just wanted to check to see if you had a prescription for my son Aaron. His doctor’s office was supposed to have called it in this morning.
Pharmacy Lady #2: Birth date?
Me: 1/11/05
Pharmacy Lady #2: Yes, we have it. You can come down to pick it up.
Me: Praise be to God! (I was apparently still over-flowing with the Spirit from bible camp.)

So we journeyed back down to Wal Mart AGAIN to get the medication. FYI: At this point a whole week has passed since the initial doctor’s appointment where we were given the illusive prescription. We pulled into the drive thru…

Me: (Pushed the little call button in the drive-thru)
Pharmacy Lady #3: Can I help you?
Me: Yeah, I’m picking up a prescription for Aaron.
Pharmacy Lady#3: Birth date?
Me: -SIGH- 1/11/05
Pharmacy Lady #3: I’m sorry, but we don’t have anything for him.
Me: You have GOT to be kidding me. I JUST spoke with someone here not twenty minutes ago who said that it was ready and in the words of my beloved Bob Barker, I could “come on down.”
Pharmacy Lady #3: Well, what’s the birth date again?
Me: Son of a…1/11/05
Pharmacy Lady #3: No, I’m sorry.

Now I know that she is just screwing with me and that she DOES have a prescription with Aaron’s name on it, but the birth date must have been called in wrong. So I asked if by some chance the office gave Elyse’s birth date by mistake and I gave her that date, but she acted like I was requesting top secret military plans for an alien research facility in Roswell, New Mexico, and refused to say anything except that she didn’t have anything for Aaron.

So now it is sweltering outside and I had shut the van off so that I wouldn’t waste gas while dealing with this lady. We were sitting there with no air conditioning and I am just about to loose my marbles. Sweat is starting to drip down my back and the kids are torturing each other with another swell edition of Not Touching, Can’t Get Mad and Here, Hold My Booger. I calmly explained to Pharmacy Lady #3 that she could go do whatever she had to do, but that I was going to sit in that drive-thru to call the doctor and get everything worked out.

Again, the girl at the pediatrician’s office was very nice and said that she would get Wal Mart right on the line while I was on hold to straighten everything out once and for all.

And so I’m holding…

Then she comes back on the line and says that the birth date was wrong (Um, yeah!) and now everything is good. Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it.

Me: (Pushed the little call button in the drive-thru)
Pharmacy Lady #3: Can I help you?
Me: Yeah, I’m picking up a prescription for Aaron.
Pharmacy Lady #3: Birth date?
Me: (shaking from the amount of force it is taking to not reach through that little speaker and choke the ever living crap out of this lady) 1…..11….05.
Pharmacy Lady #3: Ok, well did you just call it in cause it takes a half an hour for drive-thru orders?
Me: You JUST talked to the doctor’s office. Everything is supposed to be taken care of and….
Pharmacy Lady #3: Ok Honey, let me go see. (long pause) Ok, well like I said, it takes a half an hour for drive-thru orders and you can’t wait in the drive-thru because someone else might need to get a prescription.
Me: (deep cleansing breath. In with the good, out with the bad…) I will have my husband get it on his way home.

You would think that that was the end of the story. You would think that Mike went to get the prescription and that the world was all rainbows and sunshine again, but I’m not done yet. On the drive home, I started wondering if the new prescription was something that would dissolve or if it was another pill and we would have to go through the dance of the insane prescription ordeal all over again. So, with a deep breath, I called Wal Mart.

This time I got some guy who I had never spoken to which was odd because I was pretty sure that over the course of the last week that I had had some kind of contact with just about everyone employed at the Wal Mart pharmacy. When I asked him if this new medication was something that would dissolve he said…Can you guess what he said? Come on, guess. No really, this will be fun.

He said that it does NOT dissolve and that the only thing that does dissolve is the Prevacid…which was the first prescription that we tried to get…which costs over a hundred dollars…because our insurance sucks AND the universe hates me.

Long story short (too late) after another call to the pediatrician, Aaron was prescribed a new medication in liquid form. There is a liquid antacid available. Tee hee, hee… we could have avoided this entire mess… Ha, ha, ha, if Dr. All-Knowing had just prescribed this liquid from the start. Hah, ha, ha, haaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh, that’s a good one. Oh that’s rich. Hold on, I can’t breath. Wait. Give me a second to compose myself….