Now that I have once again switched gears from Intrepid Adventurer to Grumpy Hermit, I find that as much as I want to have amusing anecdotes to share, for the most part the only thing I have to laugh at lately is myself … and I am not all that funny. But, try as I might, I can’t completely isolate myself from a world growing ever more silly, so an anecdote or two occasionally slips into my cave. Usually revolving around my old enemies … bureaucracy and corporations.
It has been a recent irony in my life that our Healthcare System (which truly is a huge joke in this country) probably causes me more medical issues than hedonistic living … mostly due to the stress of dealing with it. Fortunately for you guys … that is not what I am going to relate. But it does allow me the segue into prescription writing stories.
It is commonly understood that poor handwriting is part of medical training (just like asking us if everything is ok when our mouth is full is part of wait-staff training). It makes sense since our concept of good healthcare revolves around how many drugs we can get into our system (the legal ones of course). We are given keys to obtain these drugs. To ensure we don’t actually know what we are putting into our bodies, there are mult-levels of security in place ; big, unintelligible words written in such a way that only the highest trained personnel can read it. We call these keys prescriptions.
Recently it was suggested to my mom that she should get a certain vaccine. Vaccines are a dubious creation that may or may not actually do anything for anyone, may or may not actually cause HARM to folk, and definitely make money for someone who is NOT US. Typically prescriptions are not required for these thingies, thought they might be issued so one does not accidentally get the wrong bit of questionable chemical creations in their system. In mom’s case, she was not issued a prescription, just the name of the vaccine on a piece of paper.
The writer of this particular note obviously got poor grades in Prescription Writing 101, because it is actually very legible. But they did not fail completely, for when my mom asked for Prevnar B she was greeted with a confused look, followed by the question: “Do you mean Prevnar 13?”
Who comes up with these names anyway?
