Charcoal Drawings by Vanessa Rodriguez

Can You Help Me Find the Metamucil?

Shara Drake

“I have always thought that would be kind of a fun job, counting pills and stuff ya know.” That is what usually comes to mind when most people think of a pharmacy technician: the pill counting. But really you do so much more of the “and stuff” than that. While working as a pharmacy technician over the last ten years I’ve learned that you must become a personal shopper and assistant some days, a phone answering service and a detective most days, and a patient advocate every day.

Being a personal shopper isn’t the hardest part of the job, but it gets interesting when people start disclosing a little too much information. I can tell you the exact aisle and shelf location of all the constipation aides, they are by far our most requested items. At least once an hour I will get a customer coming up and wanting to know where the magnesium citrate is, it is kind of the holy grail of all the poop juice. Well it’s on the very bottom shelf in the middle of aisle G12 and its probably shoved all the way to the back of the shelf so you basically have to get on the floor to reach any of it. Then they come back one minute later and ask you to come show them. That’s when it gets interesting, anytime someone gets asked “can you come show me?” by a customer we always wish him/her good luck, and if it’s a repeat offender we say, “it was nice knowing ya buddy.” 

One time I went to show this woman where the Epsom salts were. She uses it as a fertilizer for her roses, and it is another product on the bottom shelf that gets overlooked frequently. Before I even got to finish with the woman, I got stopped by a lanky forty something balding man and asked “if we had any of that over the counter Viagra stuff?”

Face palm.  “No, sorry sir, that is a prescription only product.”

His face had disappointment written all over it, not to mention the woman I had been helping turned about ten different shades of red and she excused herself around the corner. 

“Is there anything like it that doesn’t require a prescription?” he asked as I was starting to walk away to find Epsom salt lady again. 

“Umm, not really, there’s nothing out here that’s been proven to work by the FDA and not interact with any other kinds of medications you may be taking, if it’s something you’re really interested in though I would just put a phone call in to your physician and see if they would write you a script.” Again, he looked disappointed, but he thanked me awkwardly, and asked where the razors were, which I gladly took him too because it was right where the Epsom salts were, and I had a chance to find my original customer and see if she ever found her rose bush fertilizer. Leaving our protected little “fish tank” of a pharmacy to go out into the store makes for a nice little break to get to walk around a bit, but your also at the mercy of the customers coming into your personal space, grabbing your arm as you walk by, and even getting hit by a cart every now and then.

As far as answering the phones, that’s probably what we spend most of our day really doing. People are busy, and even more people cringe at the thought of having to go into Walmart, so a lot of them call ahead of time to place an order or see if an order is already done for them. In great cases you can answer the call, greet them like we are trained to do, let them know when and if the prescription is finished and say goodbye, easy peasy. But then there comes the investigation part of the phone calls:

 “Why is my birth control forty dollars this month when it was just nine dollars last month?!” or “how am I out of refills already, I just saw my doctor last week!”. The pharmacy is really the middle man between the doctor and the patient and insurance and the patient, so if something has changed on one end and makes it all the way to the patients end, I need to make some phone calls and start doing some detective work to figure out why things have changed. 

So I will make a call to the insurance company, be transferred to a couple different representatives, find the root of the issue, then have to call the patient to let them know the status of the issue. “Rhonda, hi this is Shara calling you back in regards to your prescription form earlier, I just wanted to let you know that I called your plan and talked with a representative and it turns out your coverage lapsed on the first, they gave me a member services number so you can call and get your plan reinstated.” Chances are that Rhonda got a letter saying her coverage was lapsing and didn’t read it or did read it and didn’t understand what it was saying. 

Calling the doctor’s office is much different than calling the insurance companies, calling the doctor’s office you get to know the nurses by voice and almost start a weird kind of phone friendship with them after so long and never actually meet in person. 

“Hey Jenny, it’s Shara here at Walmart, calling on one of Dr. White’s patients.” You start to talk about how busy the weeks been or if it’s a full moon or not because people are starting to act a little nuts. 

There are the phone calls that roll the personal shopper and the answering service into one too. One of the most out-of-place things I have been asked to do was check the price on a set of new tires. I found the price online using my cell phone and the Walmart app. I joked about how I usually call the Deli to ask about my tires, kind of sarcastic but they laughed and thanked me for my time.

One thing that’s incorporated into all roles though is being compassionate for the patient. As gross as some stories get and as long as some phone calls can take, these patients are depending on you to take care of them. One of my favorite patients to see come in is a man who had a liver transplant, so he was on transplant drugs that were costing him almost three hundred dollars a month! He was barely making ends meet because of this cost and was considering going without, which would have really put his life at risk. After making a couple calls to his insurance company and to the doctor’s office that did the transplant, I figured out a way to get his cost down to sixty dollars a month, which hey, is still expensive but much better than three hundred, and after that it went down monthly until he was only paying eight dollars for a three months’ supply! The tears in his eyes were from pure gratitude, and I have made a friend for life by just listening to his story and caring about his situation. 

So, no being a pharmacy technician isn’t a glamorous or high praised job, and the extra obligations of personal shopping and nonstop phone tag make can be exhausting at times. But, the days when you get to make someone else’s day or even week, when they show their genuine sincerity, you feel a sense of pride in your work and yourself and go home knowing that you did make a difference, even to just one person.