One Year Free of the Dungeon

I can’t believe it. It’s been one year. 365 days since I quit my job as a pharmacist to write full time. Prior to that, I’d been doing the same job (for the most part) for 18 years. 6,570 days (plus leap years). Hopefully, I’ll never go back.

It was one of those careers that was fun… at first. I worked in a hospital, mostly in oncology. I treated cancer patients, helped with chemo protocols, oversaw the mixing of sterile IV poisons to kill cancer cells and hopefully not their hosts. It felt good. Worthwhile.

Then I moved to Atlanta. Because I didn’t know the area yet, my sister-in-law set me up with a grocery chain pharmacy job. I hated it, or more accurately, the people hated me. A northern girl in not so high income Georgia. I couldn’t understand most of what they said, they didn’t trust me further than they could throw me.

But I recovered. Found a job in home infusion. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when people are too sick to take pills for their disease, but not sick enough to be in the hospital. This job, I loved. We spoke to our patients by phone, talked to them about their side effects, and sometimes their personal lives. My coworkers were a blast and it was a very positive environment. But of course, all good things must end. Business exploded. More people were hired, but never quite enough. The pager we carried on nights and weekends, the one that never ever went off, became a regular annoyance. Working late, working every weekend without additional days off, non-stop crises over and over and over.

After the birth of my first child, I made the decision to leave. Loved the coworkers, loved my patients, hated the job. With a husband who traveled for work, how was a new mother supposed to go to work at eleven at night when the pager went off? Bring the baby? Thanks, no thanks.

That’s when I discovered the true hell of retail pharmacy. Oh, but at first, it was awesome. Lots of cheery coworkers. Happy customers. Time to discuss medication and illnesses. Then, the drug boom. Diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease… the fattening of America led to the explosion of prescription drugs. No longer did you visit the pharmacy when you were sick, you visited it so you wouldn’t be sick. No one took just one pill, it was four, five, ten pills per day. Corporate got greedy, saw dollar signs. Cut back help. Instituted time monitoring equipment like the type at McDonalds that tracks how long a car sits at the drive thru. So you’re supposed to fill prescriptions with a gun to your head to make certain time limits, else you got a bad score. Bad score=lots of harassing by management. Add to that all the changes the government made to healthcare and prices went up. I was shouted at, berated, told I was the reason someone was going to die if they couldn’t buy their medicine.

It was too much.

At the very end, my once friendly, happy, smiling coworkers were a bunch of grumpy, bitching, snarling lunatics. Myself included. Thank GOD two years before I finally said to hell with this, I began writing books. It was on a lark. Just a challenge to myself to see if I could do it.

And what do you know, not only did I find something I loved to do, but that book became an Amazon best seller. Top 100, top 30 even. And the two after that. By the time I told my boss that I literally didn’t need to take his shit anymore, I had thirteen published books out.

Now and then I miss my career, but I know what I’m missing are the “good ‘ol days”. The camaraderie, the friendships, the smiles. Happy customers, grateful patients. But I know those days are gone. Companies want more prescriptions churned out with less help. I don’t want to be the one to make a fatal mistake while playing “beat the clock” with someone’s life.

Thanks but no thanks. I think I’ll stick to fantasy-land.