Infertile ambassador

This rotation I'm at a rural community pharmacy. It's a lovely place. Nobody has yelled at me or any employee while I've been there. I mean, once the family member of a young hospice patient got kind of loud when worrying about making sure the patient got enough pain medications and that nobody was diverting them. We were taking a list of exactly who may pick up medications and making sure every person in the pharmacy knows to check IDs every time for this patient so I get it. That's a really hard thing to handle and I think the family member was doing a very admirable job. Aside from consulting for the local hospice agencies, this pharmacy does a variety of things including filling any and just about every prescription that comes through the door.

This week that meant a prescription for 5 days of an antibiotic prescribed by a doc at a fertility clinic a few hundred miles away. We had some trouble with billing it and didn't have the drug in stock and it cost a lot so we called the doc to see if we could switch it. By "we" that means me, of course. It's a lot of fun most of the time, calling for lots of transfer prescriptions. This kicked me in the gut. Nobody else had a clue what those antibiotics were for, but I knew. The rest of the medication profile reminded me that few people land right on IVF and it kicked me again. Infertility stinks.

So I practiced what I would say in my message for the doctor in my head and made the call. Later I got the call back from the nurse and then I got the patient herself to talk about the new medication. This pharmacy counsels everyone on a new medication and often otherwise. This was one time for sure I didn't need the pharmacist to help me with what to say about the medication or its use. I wish I were less familiar with the ins and outs of infertility treatments.

After I finished my charting on talking to the patient and wished her all the best this time and that I hoped I wouldn't see her again getting this medication, the pharmacist said, "I wish I knew more about fertility treatments." I gave her the 5 minute run-down on what medications get used in a typical cycle since we had a complete med list for this patient in front of us to look at, pointed out that I'm super lucky to not have personal experience with treatments but that I have a number of friends who have gone through different treatments, and that goo.gling "IVF regimen" would net her a selection of blogs with a great listing of the different regimens.

I forget how different things have been for me and us sometimes. It's the new normal, knowing about icing your progesterone injection site before the shot so it hurts less and that sesame oil is supposedly less burning than peanut. It's the new normal to know that birth control pills are used sometimes not at all to avoid pregnancy but to induce a period for a medicated cycle in hope of a baby. I didn't giggle at the note in the chart where the pharmacy student before me talked about how she discussed using a back up method of contraception if this patient missed a pill, not very much, I just smiled to myself.

It's nice now, that I can use my knowledge for good. It helps to do something for others. Even though it's a small something to be a sympathetic ear to a patient, to help someone learn how to be a little less clueless for the next patient, I'm glad I can do it. Sometimes I wish things had been different and I hope nobody in the world ever goes through infertility because it is awful, but yesterday I was glad to have the knowledge so I wasn't another clueless person on the journey for someone. I'm glad I could be a reluctant ambassador from the lands of infertility to the realms of the fertile. I guess there really is a silver lining in every stinking nasty cloud, even in the hurricanes.