Umm I can't believe people are actually reading this. Ha ha, that should motivate me to de-sloppify my writing, but then it just wouldn't be as great. At the end of the day I don't usually give two shits anywho.... We'll see.

I'm so enjoying spending time with just genuinely good friends back home. I must say, many of these friends I have taken for granted at one time or another and have just tossed aside in my mind, thinking "we are in different places in our lives now. Our friendship is just a formality" but i find myself more drawn to these people than ever. I want to be a real friend to them and to make an impact in their lives, like they are making in mine... okay enough of the mush.

But seriously I have had such great times and convos......I'm so thankful. Jordan's home from Iraq. I have the best conversations with that guy. Looking forward to some Lost and good movies and talks before he leaves again... He's such a fresh perspective in a sometimes suffocating town.

I'm also a lot less likely to put up with bullshit..... I'm not mean, I'm not coldhearted, I'm just beginning to get practical. There are some people out there who I used to long to be with that I am realizing are toxic and have slowly been weeding them out. It's awesome because I don't miss them once I do. Thankfully. These are not the kind of people you can change, but the kind of people who slowly change you not for the better. And I'm done with those kinds of things that are not good for me...yes, yes I am.

Then, there's the people who....how do I say this? ... think they know you, love you, want to be with you....what not. But they don't. The most nauseating of all is the feeling of being misunderstood. Terrible.

Apologies if my writing seems cryptic. I don't apologize for honesty, though. Sometimes I just need to vent, but I decided I'm no longer posting my blogs on private because sometimes a little censoring makes you realize that some thoughts I ought not to think.... You know?

In other news, I'm working up to running a 5k again. I am already getting faster and hope to surpass last summer's time. My sister's working on it too and she's doing an awesome job methinks. I've also been adding more weights and strength building stuff and really felt it yesterday while I was working. lol. I'm hoping that once I get up to my best time I can keep or improve it more this coming year at Malone. Thank God for putting things in writing. It makes you want to do it more.

I love Nerds. Candy and/or humans. Whichever one you feel comfortable with. Sprees are excellent.

Pharmacy life.....which is so different from my real life..... it's complicated. Easier to write about for others to see because my life is usually something i keep for private when it comes to the web. As a semi-internet-stalker it makes me nervous that someone will read this and know more about me than i about them... Back to pharmacy life. It's a little crazy right now because they sent me to this wonderful store that I love and the people there love me and it's great buttttttt the big guys think it's so wonderful that I'm an already trained tech that lives close to a lot of the pharmacies they need training in so they made up a little B.S. title for me and that is a "Floating tech" which is total crap but they want to put me where people need help when other techs go on vaca. Just so you know, there are people who all they do is be "Floaters" and that means they are pharmacists that go wherever they need to 7 days a week to whatever pharmacy for their job. And let me tell you, floaters get paid a sinful amount. SO I says to myself.....if I'm a floating tech, I'd better see the money for that stuff! Right? right. Long story short, I have worked a few times with my P.D.M (pharmacy district manager) and talk to him now and again and have a good relationship with him, so i called him on his cell today and told him the whole story, and thankfully, he recognizes my abilities and as a floating tech, I will get well paid the part too. Yay!

Also, the ugliest woman came in today. She actually wasn't that ugly but her behavior today made her ugly as sin. She was what we call a problem customer (not because of her attitude but because of her insurance, etc. we were just having problems getting her dad's meds covered) and because of all the problems she soon became what we call a Bitch...pretty self explanatory. Long story short, I bent over backwards finding out what was going on and then this lady, with her cell phone attached to her ear after not listening to a damn word I said, accused me of losing her father's prescription which was the farthest from the truth considering I was staring at it for 2 hours today. At that point I said "Okay" and walked away. She left and her sweet old father called apologizing profusely for her daughters behavior and he said he wasn't going to "fly away" if he didn't get his meds today. I said that's all good and fine but you ARE going to get your meds today and I'll make sure of it. He said something along the lines of oh that's okay i don't want to be a trouble, but to me, that is what I want! I want him, at the end of the day to go to bed with his meds on his dresser without a worry in his mind about how they got there. It's just the people who are damn retards that want nothing but to yell and complain to somebody that make me so irritated I can't even express.

This was kind of a crazy, crappy day overall for more reasons than one. I'm going to sleep on it and wake up early and fill my day with happiness and sunshine. This includes pb&j for breakfast and a long bike ride to somewhere I've never been before. Also lots of sunshine and perhaps some fake sunshine, who knows. Then I will shower, go to work, love my life, head over to hang out with Dane most likely and just enjoy my life. Yes, Yes I will.

God, are you still there?? I'm ready for You. I'm ready for something else. Come on in.

I will update!

Updating this thing..... I don't do it often. However, it is so useful to me in venting at the end of a ridiculous, involved and sometimes unrewarding pharmacy day. Usually though, it is rewarding. That's also why I know I want to do it the rest of my life...eek.

Nowadays are summer days and when I come home for summer I always look for a store that really needs help like right now. I'm such a transient tech. I'll be gone come August but I've got 4 long months I need to work. So they put me in Lexington, Ohio, in a brand new store. It's a beautiful layout, called a "World Store" by my chain. I'm absolutely in love with it. It is the quintessential pharmacy, complete with adequate working areas, scanners for each input station, a lovely counseling area, and generally all new equipment. It does have a drive though. It's huge and the customers love to come in at 30 minutes til we open and stare at us. And we can't hide. It is bullet proof glass though.......I take comfort in that.

The people at the store are phenomenal. They are small town people that used to run a small town private owned pharmacy called Lexington Drugs. Love them. My chain bought out that pharmacy and the pharmacist there came over and brought quite a few people with them. Precious people. Terrifying customers. Now when I say terrifying, let me clarify this meaning of the word as opposed to when I work in Canton. In Canton, terrifying meant "dearlord i don't wanna get shot by this person when i walk out of here" or "i can't believe what is coming out of this person's mouth and why won't they stop staring at me". This terrifying is more of a realization that most of these people have a undying desire to control every last detail of their daily agenda. Terrifying because they remember you and your name. (Everybody there knows my name after 2 weeks. They make special note to look at my name-tag, my face, my name-tag again, my hair, my nails, what shoes I'm wearing, how I walk, what computer I usually work at, ask me a few questions, then act like my best friend....it's utterly terrifying). After being at Canton for 3 years, I still get called Steph.... I never correct them because I'm fairly certain they won't remember me the next day.

I'm excited about working here and kind of teaching the girls (and the pharmacist) some new things and really improving the service. They're already offering me a big raise (finally some recognition!) and I'm hoping to travel a bit and train people in some other states.

I WILL UPDATE THIS THING THIS TIME!!!

That promise is more me convincing myself.

Woah, Jesus

Recently, my general attitude towards life has been fighting off the offensive.

I have plenty of reasons to be offended. By human terms, anyway.

So when dealing with a harsh blow again today, I began to seek the Bible for something, anything that would soothe my aching and hurting heart. Something that would say "Bethany, you are so kind, so good, and you don't deserve this."

That's not really Jesus' way, though. I should have known that.

The first verse I was drawn to is Matthew 16:21-23 where Jesus is explaining to the disciples that he must suffer horrible things at the hands of the chief priests, elders, and teachers of the law and they will kill him and on the third day he will rise. Peter, never one to hold his human feelings in, says 'No way. This can't happen to you, Lord.'

What Jesus says is this: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns."

Woah, harsh words, right? I'm pretty sure Jesus isn't allowed to say that.



But I think what Jesus is saying is that gross, self-centered, purposeless human self-pity that keeps us from completing God's work is of the devil, straight from Hell. Yep, that sounds like a big dose of Truth headed straight for my heart.

Jesus never accepted sympathy from others because no one understood His purpose...nobody accept God himself could give sympathy to Jesus.This is simply because nobody else was concerned with God's plan!! They were all thinking about their stupid human concerns, which we should know only get in the way of what He's trying to do. Maybe the whole Satan thing wasn't too far off, eh?

When I look at self-pity in the context of counseling and psychology, God has revealed (yet another) new Truth concerning this. (PS- praise God for his creation of the human mind) Self-pity produces no change. Self-pity encourages the counsellee to continue to seek sympathy and more reasons not to change.

Pride and self-centeredness, our natural state in sin, include self-pity. It is when people cannot get their own way and feel frustrated in their designs that they can descend into self-pity, an ever-increasing spiral (unless confronted with and repented of).

The danger of self-pity is imminent in my life. When I am in the middle, when I am tossed aside after always being there, when I am forgotten by close friends, when I work so hard and yet still have nothing to show, when I am prepared for a task and yet still fail, how easy it is to indulge in a little self-pity, which I absolutely admit I have done more than once this week. I am tempted to think/believe when my Christian brothers and sisters have extend sympathy, "You're right, what I have on my plate is too hard" which is dangerously close to, "God has given me more than I can handle" This, brothers and sisters, is sin. Pure and simple, this is a slap in our Creator's face. It needs to stop...

I must say that all in all, writing these notes are often more therapeutic to me than I intended them to be for others.

Who You?

Today was drug abuser day at the pharmacy. Yayyy, I love drug abuser day. It's the day I tell all the kids on vicoden and morphine that they can't ruin their livers for a few more days cuz they just got 280million two days ago and they shouldn't be out; but of course, they are, and the doctor just wrote it wrong.

Also, it was relatively steady and wonderfully paced. Me and the gals had some fun talks but I was pretty happy to finally go home tonight.

Thursday, I get to work at the other pharmacy in Mt. Vernon and I get to work there with a fill-in pharmacist. Now my experience has been, people freak out when they don't recognize the person in the pharmacy. They have even more trouble when it's the pharmacist who's unfamiliar. They crap their pants when the pharmacist's foreign.

I learned this lesson quickly the first few fill ins I worked with. Fill ins are either lazy, mean, or foreign. I love the foreign ones cuz they're the funniest. I don't mind the lazy ones because I like to do things my way anyway. The mean ones I don't like because I don't like mean people.

But the customers, they don't like em regardless. They look at them with their evil eye and just watch 'em, like... they've got something growing out of their neck. And if they want to speak to the pharmacist they ask, "Well, where's ______? I want to talk to them" It's quite frustrating to me. One time, when my friend Tamer, the intern, answered the phone, they wouldn't talk to him, because he was foreign. When they asked to talk to me, I said that if they couldn't talk to him, I was going to tell them the same thing he did, so they couldn't talk to me.

Well, just the other day evidently, a woman walked into my Fredericktown store. That day, it was me, Dee the regular tech, and our fill-in pharmacist, Amin, a fill-in who happens to be a very large African man. The woman immediately turned around and went to the local sheriff's department. She wanted to inform them that the pharmacy...was being robbed by a black man and a some woman she didn't recognize....LOL. Fortunately there wasn't anybody readily available for her there at the sheriff's department, so she ran over next door to the municipal office and told the secretary the news, who called us and asked if we were okay. We were shocked to find out that someone actually thought I was robbing the store with my cute hair & blue smock!! I don't look like a freaking robber! Which of course started Amin on his usual discrimination speech. "Man, I'm scared to come to your store. I feel much safer in Columbus. I come here, and feel like I'm going to get shot." I tell Amin that nobody will shoot him here, they'll just smile to his face and talk about him behind his back, which is not much better than getting shot really.

Sittin' on the Porch Drinkin' Ico Cooold Cherry Coke;)

So today was awesome. By awesome I mean ridiculous...because I mean it was a pretty busy Saturday for this store I suppose and alot was going on too. We did over 70 by 1:00. Pretty good. But I'll go ahead and start you out today with a little taste of this town I work in this summer. (My normal store is where I go to college during the school year).

First off all, I drive a good 40 minutes to get there...and the closest store of our chain to this one is another 20 minutes away from that. My pharmacy is the only one in this town. They have two traffic lights, three at most, there are tons of old people and no big chains...the only chain store in the town is said pharmacy. Everybody knows everybody and is consequently in their business. HIPPA laws are often spat upon daily by the 20 people standing at the counter at once.

Nine o'clock am...me and Linda arrive to find the order waiting on us that was supposed to come yesterday...which it did, only at 10:30 at night...that's how fed ex rolls this month i guess...so we look at the order and laugh because we know it's not going to get put away for another good 3 hours because there is already a line of insane people who are up bright and early and ready to drop off/pick up/wait around for their prescriptions!! because they've already been to the doctors and back and they have errands to run and why the hell would they sleep in on a SATURDAY MORNING!! There's things to be done in this town!! ha I honestly don't understand, if I didn't have to work, I, for sure, would not have been upright at that hour...

So anyways, I had my coffee & Linda had hers and we were in "the mode" we get in when there's business to do, instantly syncing into the rhythm we have with drop offs, pick-ups, talking customers, ringing phones, insurance companies, counting to 90, Linda and I's irrelevant conversations about camping and babies, and sticky labels.

However after a few hours, "Diarrhear" lady calls in. By the way, to add to this story, she is also the woman who didn't know her own birthdate nor did her daughter who was in yesterday to get her medicine, and she was the one I had to call all 5 help desks at Caremark for... MMmmm....she inquires if she's had anything called in yet today.
"Yes you have!" I say in my slow and pronounced voice that the geriatrics usually understand, "It's a Z-pack for your sinus infection!" (most commonly prescribed anti-biotic everrr...it's really hard core..you take 2 on the first day and one every day for 4 more days and bam you're done in 5 days compared to like 7, 10 or 28 like other anti-biotics)
She says, "Well that's very good!! that other one really gave me...{insert a long detailed reference to her diarrhear here}..
Ok, so I'll be right in"

When the very elderly lady comes in, I tell her as I'm checking her out that it's also kind of hard on your stomach...so be careful and eat it with something...
"Like crackers?"
"Sure...crackers are fine, just make sure your stomach has something in it"
"Bread?"
"Crackers, bread, toast, cereal....whatever you'd like to have in your stomach."
"Maybe some cereal with milk?"
"I suppose."
"Well, milk upsets my stomach sometimes."
"Ok...then maybe just toast or crackers."
"Oatmeal maybe? With only a little milk?"
"Well I mean...If that's what you want, sure that's fine!"
"I like oatmeal, but perhaps I'd better stick with toast.."
At this point I'm getting a tad irked, I felt that my time was being a tad wasted when there was so much to be done in my workday already...
"Toast is probably best, Mrs. _______"
"Okay...well I just want to say thank you so much, sweetie. You have just been so helpful to me and I told my daughter today just what a sweetheart you have been to us. God bless you, sweetie, and have a good day!"

aksdjflksdjfsdl;j awwwhhh.... frick....
I felt bad about feeling irritated. When she said that it kinda made the trouble worthwhile.


Now, this may suprise you but the highlight of my day was not that, but this:
A man who gets many prescriptions at our pharmacy has recently had trouble with his insurance company covering Celebrex, a pricey medication used for joint pain associated with arthritis. It's very very expensive so it needs a prior authorization from the doctor before his insurance will cover it. I've been on the phone with him off and on all week to see if it had gone through and now that the weekend's here we have to wait until Monday to try it again. So this guy comes in to pick his other various meds today. He's a pretty solid and big guy with an even bigger personality and presence. He's about in his 20s and looks like one of those loud, but funny and hardworking guys, who's everyone's buddy but just don't mess with him..ha.
I tell him that I tried his Celebrex today.
"Did it go through?"
"No unfortunately not, plus it's the weekend to we'll most likely just wait until Monday to run it. Have you called your doctor to inform him of the prior auth so he can call your insurance?"
"Yeah I did a while ago but I'll call him again today. Why doesn't the insurance company want to pay for it?"
I explained to him the various possibilities from cost to step therapy but ultimately that we didn't know why and he'd have to call his insurance to find out why they rejected it. "It's mainly about cost though, they want you to try less expensive meds first before they have to cover this pricey one"
"Oh," he said, and after a short pause he looked down.

"...Bastards," he whispered.

hahahaha....so funny to me for some reason, it made my day.

I'm out!

From Celebrex to Levitra & back again. (True Stories)

Today, I worked ten hours at the pharmacy.

Highlights include the woman who didn't have her insurance card and didn't know her birthday, so I had the task of maneuvering Caremark's help-desks to figure out which of 5 bin numbers she was listed under knowing only her name and address....yessss.

Also the woman who called telling me about her "diarrhear"....barf barf. If any of you are unaware, I'm not a medical professional. I don't know what to do for you over the phone, nor am I a doctor. I safely and accurately dispense exactly what your doctor prescribes, or of course the generic equivalent which is supposed to be covered by your plan for a $5 copay, but am I sure it's the same medication? yes I'm sure.. well why does it look so different? Does it have the same stuff in it? Yes it does. How do you know? It says so and it's regulated by the FDA! Good gracious....

I don't want to hear about why you got your vasectomy (true story), E.D., or hemorrhoids. Yes, I can see when you've last gotten your vicoden. I know that you've been getting it from a two different doctors in different towns and that you go to different pharmacies paying cash.... True story, I've caught 7 drug abusers who are now in jail.

Also true story, I once caught a nurse who was using her nurse practitioner's lisence to write alprazolam (Xanax)prescriptions for a chemo patient under her care who was a shut in. She got them filled under his name, & when the prescription ran out of refills, I called the house to inform him. A Hospice lady picked up the phone and told me he has never ever been on alprazolam before. It ended up that this nurse practitioner was taking the alprazolam.... She is in jail.

I love my job, but I don't love seeing people sick, or abusing. I love doing whatever I can to get a drug covered or get it done as fast as I can so you can go home as soon as you can. I love being good at what I do, but good gracious don't tell me about your anal blockage.

I will ralph.