Medicine Mix-Up

Yesterday I had all my vitamins, supplements, and prescriptions out on the table, and I was filling up my pill containers for the trip. I had just picked up a bunch of refills from the pharmacy that afternoon, too. I am bringing 14 days of drugs, althought the trip is actually 12 days, just in case we get stuck somewhere.

For each vitamin or medicine, after I finished filling the pill container, I set that bottle aside so I could see how many bottles were left to deal with.  When there was just one bottle left, I was sort of mystified because according to my expectations, the pill containers were full and complete.

I looked at the remaining bottle. It was a prescription made out to me by Dr Reidel. The name was prochlorperazine, generic of prochlorperazine maleate. I had no clue what this drug was and why they had filled it for me. So I googled prochlerperazine maleate and flipped out. It is an anti-psychotic drug for schizophrenics who have severe symptoms!  Yikes!  How could this happen, that the pharmacy gave me someone else's drug?! I worried about some poor schizoprenic out there being told that there was no prescription waiting for her. What would the voices in her head say about that?!

I called the pharmacy, but they had closed already. I told the clerk that the pharmacy had made a huge mistake, and he said I needed to talk to the pharmacy manager in the morning.

Lou talked me out of fishing through the trash can in the garage looking for the pharmacy insert that must have come with the mystery bottle. I couldn't learn anything from the insert that I would not learn in the morning when I called the pharmacy. He was right.

I glanced at another web site that google found for me, and then the word compazine jumed out at me. Compazine is one of the anti-nausea drugs I used to have for chemo and which I will be using again for the new round of chemo.

Had Dr Reidel called in a new prescription for me without telling me? He had asked me to bring my old bottle of pills with me on June 2 so he could make sure that the old ones were not expired and so he could call in a new prescription.. I looked again at the mystery bottle, at the fill date.  6-28-2009.  Oh God, I had not even noticed the date. 2009 is last year. This was my old bottle of compazine, which I had taken out of the drawer to that I would not remember to bring it to my appointment. I always kept an elastic band around it, so it would stand out from the other bottles and be easy to find if I ever felt nauseated. But I had thrown away the grungy elastic band and put the bottle on the kitchen table, where it had gotten mixed in with all my other bottles by accident.

The first thing I thought of was, Thank God the pharmacist had not been in. I would have felt like such a dope to be telling him he made a huge mistake -- only to have him tell me I was the one making the mistake. That fill date just did not register at all.

So I put the compazine away, with a new elastic band around it. I need a vacation.