So Drugmonkey, Where The Hell Have You Been? Not Investigating The Link Between Rite Aid's Flu Shots And Bubonic Plague, That's For Sure.

Oh, dear reader, the answer to that question is long and complex. Multifaceted and mutilayered. A drama of epic proportions involving long stretches of sitting on my ass looking out at the ocean, a visit from the pharmacy fairy godmother who bopped me on the nose with her magic wand, an evil pharmacist named John David Bodtker who took it all away, and time enough to finally finish up another book.

I hardly know where to start.

The most common question I got during the hiatus would be something along the lines of, "is there some legal reason for this? Did the man crack down on our beloved Drugmonkey?" The answer to that is no. You can't be sued for telling the truth, so as long as I stick to the right side of the facts, I'm fine. For example, I probably couldn't write something like "Rite Aid's flu shots give people Bubonic Plague," because there's no proof of that.

Of course, before Christopher Columbus, the mainstream scientific world said there was no proof the world was round. Just sayin'

And now that I'm sitting here pondering truth and my responsibilities to it, I should probably point out that I had direct contact with only a tiny fraction of the millions of doses of flu shots administered by Rite Aid. While it's true that I saw no evidence of a Rite Aid/Bubonic Plague connection, it's also true that my experience was such a small and limited part of Rite Aid's vaccination program that it probably shouldn't be considered representative of the risks involved. You should definitely inform yourself and carefully weigh the benefits of getting a flu shot at Rite Aid versus the risk of contracting a deadly disease that at one point almost wiped out Western Civilization. On that much I think we can all agree.

For what it's worth though, I never saw anyone get Bubonic Plague from a Rite Aid flu shot. Now, where was I?

Oh, the blog hiatus. You can thank the aforementioned John David Bodtker. I got a job he wanted you see, and he decided the best way to say "congratulations" would be to send select Drugmonkey writings to my boss. And when my boss didn't care, he just kept sending all the way up the corporate chain until he found someone who would listen. My boss cried when they told her they had to let me go. Took it harder than I did.

Other than that I'm sure John David Bodker is a nice guy. Honorable in a backstabbing kinda way.

So I suspended the little blog garden while all this drama was exploding. Until I decided what my plan would be. And then you guys broke my heart. Every time I got an email asking what was up I got a little sad. And I got a lot of those emails.

The good news is, I'm very close to engineering a happy ending to this sad story. One that will bathe the corporate stink off of me forever. I said when the Rite Aid drama went down, which had nothing to do with anyone getting Bubonic Plague from one of their flu shots, that from that day forward I would be a real pharmacist. And I'm very close to making that happen.

Good for me. And for my future patients, who will have found a refuge from the forces destroying our profession.

I'll keep you posted.