So here’s what happened.

I kept waiting for my asthma med to be dropped off by the mailman. It didn’t come. Monday I finally went looking for why. They had not recorded the doctor signing off on the thing, and whether she (likely the nurse) did or not I don’t know.

I emailed her and Caremark, since they hadn’t followed up on it.

Their system said it could not handle requests from this page, do it through that part of their system.

I DID do it from that part of their system! Their UI (user interface) is terrible! Their site is designed to make it even harder to reach them there than it is to sit through their phone tree. I sent again. I got through to someone, but they were not helpful.

So I called them, sitting through endless we are trying not to serve you diversions and finally, finally got a live human being and told them I am too deaf, I tried to do it online, and I’m afraid you are just going to have to put up with me.

She chuckled. Good for her. It helped. And she was very patient with my please-repeats.

I explained that my doctor had filled the prescription but at this point I had two doses left and their mail order system simply wasn’t going to work. Was it true that the prescription could be sent to and filled at the local CVS pharmacy?

Yes it was.

Would you please do that.

Sure!

So they had that information in their system in two places to the best of my ability and definitely via the phone conversation.

I woke up yesterday to a cheery, We have your prescription and we will be mailing it out some time in the next five days.

Facepalm. I expected this to be here two weeks ago. Think of the potential consequences of not getting an asthmatic’s meds to her in a timely manner as contracted to do.

I printed out the notice to me from the doctor and took it into the local CVS anyway. I explained my problem to the young clerk. She told me I probably didn’t want to wait there, she didn’t know how long it was going to take.

She got every detail right conveying the problem to the pharmacist, who was a helpful, earnest young voice on the phone last night and highly apologetic. He had gotten nowhere with them, and he was having a hard time with that because he knew I needed that med. They had told him there was one last person he could try–in the morning. It was the best he could do.

I thanked him profusely. He’d put a lot of effort into it and that meant a lot to me.

I woke up to an email from the mail-order folks saying they had shipped it.

Greatttttt…

Meantime, the 32% chance in the forecast of .02″ of overnight rain started at midnight and lasted till about four this afternoon, rain blessed rain clearing the smog out of the air, seven times the amount of water they’d said probably wouldn’t happen anyway. But boy did it. So, so wonderful.

I went off to the annual summer lupus luncheon and had just the best time. Old friends. Good people. Good times. And came home to a message from CVS: they had my med ready for pickup.

YES!!! THANK you, persistent compassionate pharmacist pushing on the big guys!

Was it the three month supply the prescription had been written for? No, just one. He had told me he would be obligated to fill the prescription as it was written but someone above must have decided otherwise.

I’ll take it. I’m taking them at their word that the three-month is actually in the mail like they said. And I will breathe easier tonight.

Oh and on the wildlife front? A mockingbird was displaying its tail again and again as it if were a peacock: this was his place now. A white-breasted nuthatch, and I have never seen one here before! Or never close enough to get to see at all what it was. There was what I think was my first sighting of a western meadowlark.

The ever-threatening scrub jay is gone and the whole bird world turned out to party.