Saturday, April 26, 2014Pain Management: Part 2 (My life as a junkie)I call the pharmacy (not our regular one, the one across from the hospital). A snippy woman with a thick accent and an attitude that implies I just got between her and her favorite reality show answers. I tell her I need a refill and start to give her the number: "201--"She stops me before I get to the fourth digit. Oh NO, she says, we can't refill a prescription that starts with a 2. That's a controlled substance. I say, well, I know it's a controlled substance... I was just calling to find out -- We can't refill it, she says. I say, I am getting that, but what I need to know is what I need to do to -- We can't refill it, she says. What if I get the doctor to call you-- We can't refill it, she says. Excuse me. What I was saying is what if I get the doctor to call you and fax a prescription to you? We can't refill it, you can only refill this with a physical handwritten prescription, and by this point her voice and tone are super harsh and judgmental, like I'm some fucking tweaker from Modesto trying to game the system and get some fun stuff for me and my greasy haired biker boyfriend. I get pissed off (as all good drug addicts do when someone is standing in the way of their fix) and say Hey, you don't have to get mad at me, I'm just asking a question here and trying to figure out how to get this to work. We can't refill it, she says. I hang up. I call the prescribing doctor's office. The clinic is closed; I can't get a physical Rx until Monday. I call my own pharmacy, where we've been going for years. Here's my problem, I say. The guy listens to me. Just the fact that he's listening is helping my pain level go down. He suggests I switch to something called Norco (not the town in Central California, I'm assuming, although I'd probably be having better luck up there on any given street corner). He gives me the dosage that will best match the Percocet and says it's about 20% less powerful but close enough and will get me through the day until I can see my other doc on Monday. I call the prescribing doctor's office back. They have their doctor on call call me back. I talk to her and she says the Norco is fine. She calls it in. Roger picks it up. Done. Now I can get through to Monday. Monday I see my oncological surgeon. Everything looking good. I tell her the Percoset/Norco saga. She says, OK... but at this point we want to wean you off everything, so I'm going to prescribe 600 mg of ibuprofen every 6 hours and you can take the Norco as needed for breakthrough pain. That's where the problems start. Because I'm both a weenie who can catalog five differentiations of pain (as evidenced earlier) and because I'm a tough little soldier. If they don't want me on the narcotics, fine. I won't be. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:27 PM  
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