Well, I’ve been sick the past two weeks. I’ve been cough­ing and all that oth­er nasty stuff that comes with it. This past week­end, I was­n’t even able to get out of the house. I pret­ty much stayed in my room and just coughed my lungs out. Oh what great fun it was?!

Any­ways, giv­en the fact that I picked the High-Val­ue PPO for my med­ical when I came in to work at the Bay last April ’05 (and the fact that I haven’t got­ten sick till now), my pri­ma­ry physi­cian is in LA. So, after call­ing Alame­da Hos­pi­tal for the past two days and email­ing them to help me find a doc­tor that can do a check up on me, Dr. Mom (and side­kick, my aunt) bugged me and told me to just call in to our fam­i­ly doc­tor’s clin­ic.

Fun­ny thing though, my mom called the clin­ic first to set­up some kind of appoint­ment with the admin per­son­els to get the doc­tor free for a bit in order to talk to me. But thats not it yet, my mom told the admin lady that since I’m over here, he (the doc­tor) should just lis­ten to me cough “over the phone” so he can pre­scribe me some med­i­cine. Moms… moms…

Mean­while, I got some prescription—believe it or not. The clin­ic then faxed the order over to the Rite-Aid across the street from work so I can eas­i­ly just pick it up. After fif­teen min­utes or so, I final­ly got the drug for $85. Damn, I hate get­ting sick—you feel like crap and get robbed at the same time.

So, fast for­ward to about a cou­ple of min­utes ago… remem­ber­ing what the phar­ma­cist told me about the dosage of each pre­scrip­tion, I decid­ed to just take every­thing at night before going to bed. Then, the moment of truth came. After tak­ing out the stuff from the paper bag, I thought to myself: “this bet­ter be worth $85, and not get me sick for anoth­er year or so.” Tak­ing one tea­spoon of the cough syrup and a tablet of some aller­gy stuff (seems it’s a sea­son­al thing), I final­ly got to the last item; which was for Bron­chi­tis (I guess).

Care­ful­ly try­ing to open the pack­age, I saw the fol­low­ing:

The quan­ti­ty on the receipt and brochure states that there should be 5 pills. One pill per day. But damn, WTF?!?! This ain’t 5.

Wowsers. Haven’t gone run­ning for days; cough­ing my lungs out; had to pay $85 to get well; and now this. Damn. Ai Dios Mio!

That being that, I just have to write about it and share it. Just remem­ber to check your pre­scrip­tions when you leave the phar­ma­cy so you don’t run into things like this. I nev­er thought it was pos­si­ble for such an over­sight from the phar­ma­cist. They usu­al­ly do dou­ble-check­s/triple-checks so they give you the right stuff.

I’m going to try and wake up real­ly ear­ly to go to the phar­ma­cy and do some­thing about this sit­u­a­tion. Sucks ass. Damn. This is so messed up.

Update: 4/22, 9:05am
I just called Rite-Aid and explained to them in the most com­pre­hen­si­ble way pos­si­ble my sit­u­a­tion. They told me to just go bring the pack­age so they can exchange it. I think that there can be some legal action tak­en, but there was no harm done. We’re all human right? We all make mis­takes. But crap, this expe­ri­ence just does some weird stuff to your psy­che. It prob­a­bly made me a bit more para­noid now, order­ing from a phar­ma­cy that is.