Maply sweetness

Nana's little maple nugget.

Some reasons I'm glad to be a hospital pharmacist

Early in my pharmacy career, before I graduated and sat for my boards, I decided I would follow the hospital practice track. I had worked in a very successful independent pharmacy while a student, but institutional practice beckoned to me. Now, just about twenty-five years after getting my degree and license, I am contemplating why I feel I made the right choice.


1) I don't have to worry about getting robbed at gunpoint.
2) No one asks me where the motor oil, sunglasses, Christmas cards or Sham-Wows are.
3) I'm not asked to fix electric razors or sell lottery tickets.
4) My workplace doesn't sell tobacco products or liquor. No conflict of interest.
5) I get to sit down.
6) My lunches are covered, and I can take timely bathroom breaks.
7) I have many knowledgeable pharmacist colleagues on site and at my disposal if I need to kick something around.
8) I am generally viewed as a learned member of a team of health professionals, not a speed bump in someone's discount palace pilgrimage or an unappreciated arbiter of prescription benefits.
9) I won't be inundated by waves of middle-aged, unemployed men armed with coupons for free Viagra.
10) I don't have to find a relief pharmacist so I can take a day off or a *gasp* vacation.
11) No smarmy drug reps dropping in. Well, they still drop in, they just can't get to me without going through our front office people. Good luck with that, Buffy.
12) No aisles full of sketchy herbal remedies and weight loss products.
13) No Muzak.
14) No Muzak.
15) Still no Muzak.
16) That was snarky. I'll try to be better. OK, I enjoy the kind of dialogue you can have with a physician after years of working side by side and carefully building a professional relationship based on mutual respect and deference. I imagine some of my retail comrades experience this if their store is inside a clinic or in a medical building. I hope so.
17) No cash registers.
18) No contact with damp/dirty/blood-stained/altered/forged prescriptions.
19) Daily opportunities to directly improve patient outcome by making major clinical interventions.
20) And last but probably the best: No screaming, snot-nosed children.

The downside? The fact there is a third shift and I am required to cover it once in a while. And there are the times the pneumatic tube system delivers blood, urine or stool samples to the pharmacy instead of the lab. I sure do dislike those steamers.

Pandemic, schmandemic

Thank you, major media outlets. No, really, thank you.

Hospital emergency departments were already overtaxed and bulging at the seams with patients, now we're dealing with what CNN has referred to as "the worried well." Who the hell got them so damned worried, huh? Who has them convinced that a little sniffle and a slightly funny scratchy feeling in their throat means they have the piggy plague? Who oversold this panic-demic?

It would be laughable except these anxious souls are truly frightened. Worse, they are filling up beds in the ER, thereby potentially delaying treatment for more seriously ill people. Ambulances get diverted down the road to the next available facility, and maybe further if that ER is backed up.

I give it two weeks before the panic peddlers pick up on this and start inundating us with touching stories about the patients that couldn't be seen in a timely fashion and are forever diminished, or dead, because of it. Forget the Tamiflu, I want a supply of Zofran so I don't turn myself inside out puking in disgust once the sob sisters get revved up.

It's just possible the real danger has yet to present itself. As it seems the H1N1 novel virus of 2009 is so far turning out to be a pig in a poke, the masses who have been taken in by the unrelenting media hype will become skeptical. That skepticism may indeed cost them their health, if not their lives, if this new virus follows the pattern of its pandemic predecessors that emerged as mild bumps in an epidemiological curve and returned months later as merciless and efficient killers.

As it stands now, I'm not sick. No one I know is sick. And statistics say you're probably not sick, either. Now wash your hands, stay well and stop the madness.