Can I Get A Refill?

The longer you work in a store, the more you recognize your customers. You may not know all of their names and they may not even have prescriptions filled there, but you recognize them.

So when this elderly lady walked up to the counter, telling everyone she's been coming here for 50+ years, and I didn't recognize her... well I figured this would be fun.

On the counter she set a tiny bottle with a tiny strip of dirtied paper hanging off of it. It was a bottle of Nitroquick with a prescription label.

"I figure its time to get some new ones," She said.

I ask her her name and bring up her profile. It's a pretty bare file as we hadn't filled anything since July 2004, which is slightly before when I started there. That would be why I didn't recognize the woman.

I told her we would have to contact her doctor to get a new prescription as the original one was, obviously, expired. She did not like this and insisted she had picked this up within the last year.

Looking to settle this I grab the bottle (personally I will resist the urge to pick up patient's bottles as much as I can) and inspect the label. It was heavily faded, but I could make out the fill date:

04/14/1996

Wow. Not only does it predate our computer system, but it predates the computer system prior to that. And it certainly was picked up more than a year ago... actually it was picked up more than a decade ago.

Of course when I read the date she realized that it had been more than a year. The only reason she came in was that "... they were startin' to smell a lil funky."

So the little old lady will be getting a new bottle of Nitro on Monday after her doc gets back to us. Hopefully he's seen her more recently than we have, but my bet is he has not.

Does this mean she'll be back for a refill in March 2024? Should I set a reminder? Hmmmmmmm