Opinion | All I wanted was a pill refill, but I fell into a rabbit hole

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I’m not old enough to remember when traveling snake-oil salesmen hawked miracle liniments out of carnival wagons, but I’ve been around long enough to recall the good old days when getting a prescription filled was a snap.

Back in the day, after a doctor scribbled an indecipherable prescription on a small piece of paper, you could stop at a drugstore on the way home, present it to a pharmacist whose superpowers included being able to decode the chicken-scratching and who would hand you a bottle of pills quicker than you could say, “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

Now, digital commerce allows a doctor to message a drugstore with your prescription. But you dare not assume that you can pick up the meds on the way home, or the next day, or the next.

For example, I called three prescription renewals in to the robot voice at a pharmacy a couple of weeks ago because the refill deadline was approaching. After a couple of robotic messages from the pharmacy told me of delays for one reason or another, I finally was able to pick up the pills six days before the deadline.

When I got home, I discovered that one prescription was filled only partly, with a notation on the bottle that it included just “5 of 90 pills.” I waited a couple of days, assuming that the pharmacy would message me when the other 85 tablets arrived.

Stifling umbrage, I said politely (not only because I am a polite person but also because the store has a sign urging customers respect its employees), “It doesn’t expire until today, which is why I called this in two weeks ago, and I wanted to confirm that the prescription still would be valid.”

“That’s smart,” she replied, adding the caution, “You probably should have your doctor write a new prescription.”

Ba-da-bump.

Easy-peasy, you think? Not so fast — after all, this isn’t the good old days!

I called my primary doc’s clinic — hoping to tell a person my tale of woe and ask that person to send a digital refill message to the pharmacy. I was naive to think that I’d get a person instead of a robotic voice telling me to punch a number.

The next morning, I got a message from my primary’s office saying it had OK’d a refill, even though my calls had been canceled.

Barely a half-hour later, the pharmacy left me a message saying the doctor had rejected my refill request.

By this time, I needed a drug to counteract my whiplash.

Good gawd! What if I desperately needed the prescription, if it were a matter of life or death? That’s the one point I lucked out on, because the prescription is only a water pill to make me pee more.

I’m old enough not to need a pill to pee more — all hours of the day and night. So the lack of a refill wasn’t going to kill me, but now I need something to recover from the stress.

Oh, for the days of snake-oil salesmen traveling the country in medicine wagons.