When Your Doctor's A Pussy, It May Have Adverse Consequences For Your Health

The lady looked a bit confused when I showed up at the counter with a nose spray. Nothing unusual there. Many of my customers spend most of their day looking and/or being confused.

The confusion only grew though as I started explaining that her new allergy med may take a few weeks to reach full effect, so sometimes people will use an antihistamine like Claritin to help cope with immediate symptoms until the nose spray kicks in.

After a few seconds of silence......"Allergies?.....is this the medicine we saw on TV?"

"Well, I'm not sure what you saw on TV ma'am, what was the problem that led you to see your doctor?"

After a game of 20 questions with the customer, I was able to piece together the situation that led to her crisis of confusion at the counter. The situation unfolded as follows:

Old man sees a commercial on the TV for something that he just knows he needs. He then orders his wife, and obedient Midwestern depression-era husband-servant type to call their doctor and get him some. The doctor, a limp wristed, yes sir how high should I jump sir, rich asshole-servant type, does as he is told. Except that somewhere in the process the name of the med is garbled just a bit, and instead of the Flomax the old man was sure he needed to help shrink his prostate and help him pee, a prescription is issued for Flonase, the aforementioned nasal spray.

Obviously Dr. Dumbass never saw, spoke with, or cared the slightest bit about his patient. As a result it would not have been outside the realm of possibility that the patient would have tried to spray some allergy medicine up his butt to get to his bad prostate. Trust me, stranger things have happened.

Fortunately, OBRA and I saved the rich asshole from his and his doctors mutual stupidity. OBRA is the law that mandates that I offer to explain your medicine to you when you pick it up. It stands for The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990. You get the connection between budget reconciliation and me explaining your medicine to you, right? It's as obvious as the link between Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) and me giving you a little slip of paper you will never read explaining your privacy rights in a way you won't understand. Who knows how your brains got so warped federal bureaucrats, but you kept an old man from spraying his ass today. Here's to you.