But ...I feel like I can not emphasize enough how getting out of pharmacy has changed my life.
It was almost exactly a year ago that I spent my last day as a retail pharmacist. Granted, my memory in general SUCKS. But I can't remember my last day. I know I got a really cool cake.
I also got a golden counting tray and spatula! (can't find the damn picture) I do miss the people I worked with....thankfully facebook allows us to keep in touch so easily!
I just don't remember the actual pharmacist part of the day....working for Tom was never like working at a corporate store anyway. I should have got a job at Walgreen's or CVS so that I could go out in style...telling nasty customers to suck it, telling the boss to take his metrics and stuff them up his ass. Leaving a pharmacy that I actually liked working at was a bit anticlimactic....especially since I really liked my coworkers (well most of them!!!) and because I wasn't quite done with pharmacy completely....headed off to a (gasp) full time gig, with an hour drive, in a cold warehouse!
But...once again I digress.... Over the 22 years, my reasons for hating my career choice changed. At first it was the people....God how I hated people....I'm not sure why I never got out of retail. In the early days switching to a hospital job would have been easy. I still could list hospital experience from my student jobs and clinical rotations. But hospital pharmacists made less money and back then money still had a hold on me. Then the years flew by, and the pharmacist shortage was over. Switching to another field would have been difficult and by that point I just wanted to be out of pharmacy completely...the grass wasn't greener anywhere but OUT!!
In the end, as I have mentioned in other blogs, it became about the anxiety, the sleepless nights worrying about errors. I can't say why I began to feel incompetent...was it the peri menopausal hormones that truly make you feel really stupid and forgetful? Was it because there were so many new drugs and the lack of desire to find out everything about them? Was it because I had moral and ethical issues with giving out most of these drugs...feeling I was doing more harm than good. Knowing that cholesterol drugs are probably going to become the biggest joke of our time and end up going the way of drugs like Premarin...which I used to sell by the thousands a week and now sell maybe a hundred a month! Knowing that SSRI's can be just as detrimental as they are helpful.
I saw errors increasing and companies denying it. Walgreens just didn't care. The industry trying to claim that electronic prescriptions were the answer to lowering errors....while I watched erroneous e-scripts come in all the time!! Wrong patient...wrong drug..wrong directions...wrong quantity (and yes that can matter when you are taking an antibiotic!)
When I was finally done, I had assumed that I couldn't work retail...I was NOT a people person....but after months working mostly alone in that warehouse and then unemployed, I started to miss people. So it shouldn't have come as a big surprise that I might actually LIKE working retail. But to think I would like it at the busiest time of year, when people are stressed out and cranky? THAT was a huge surprise! Will this be my forever job? Who knows....If I could do something I hated for 22 years, I can surely do something I am indifferent about. I have my foot in the door with the pet sitting and it seems like something I could enjoy. And then there's other options potentially. It will be interesting to see where it all leads. I don't want to say anything more until I have more details but it could be exciting!
I feel like I was a pharmacist a lifetime ago. I feel like I have lived in California all of my life. I have no idea what I will be doing a year from now....but I know it won't be pharmacy and I know it will be here in California....and that is why I am so damn happy!!!
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY to me!
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