Yet Another Scary Nurse Story

Ya know, the media likes to pick on pharmacies for making one small mistake, over the course of thousands and thousands of scripts, but situations like these go unnoticed.

Little back info for y'all, this patient is 71 years and old and legally blind. She is, however, smart as a whip and has developed a system based on feel in order to take her meds. Each med is in a specific container that she recognizes in order to take the proper medication. She has used this system for twenty years and it has worked flawlessly. The only drawback is she requires her home nurse to put them in the respective containers.

Now gather around the fire kiddies and let's begin our story...

***Ring ring ring*** goes the phone

Myself: "Good afternoon, shittiest pharmacy in the world, how may I help you?"

Dr: "This is Dr. Peeved Off calling from 'Non-profit' Hospital. I have a patient of mine here with her meds and I'm having a little trouble identifying it"

Myself: "Ok, what's it look like"

Dr: "Well first its in her Omeprazole bottle, but I take Omeprazole and I've never seen a capsule look like this before. It's yellow, kinda Docusate like with markings of 25mg and an hourglass"

I dig through our database looking for something that matches it. Obviously it's an oddball one, judging by the docusate-like description, and after 10 minutes I stumble upon it.

Myself: "It looks like it's Cyclosporine 25mg... which is what she gets filled on a regular basis."

Dr: "What?" - Doctor than consults with the patient for a minute, "She mentioned that she had had a little trouble this week opening the unit dose packaging and the nurse said she'd put it in a separate bottle for her. She must have put it in her Omeprazole bottle."

Myself: "Well that's cute."

Dr: "Yes it is, you don't happen to have the name of her nurse do you?"

Myself: "I don't off hand but I can give you the number of the company she works for."

Dr: "Good."

Now this is a big big fuck up in my opinion. This woman had a system that worked well for her and the nurse, being lazy and not thinking, effectively abused her system. Luckily this had only happened three days ago and the directions were the same, but irregardless this should NEVER have happened.

And sometimes you guys wonder why we bitch about nurses. If we did that, we'd lose our fucking license, but she'll most likely get a slap on the wrist.