Medicine Men

One day in July 2005 I set out on a 5-mile run that included several hills. I completed the run in spite of steadily increasing pain in the area of my outer right hip and upper thigh. I had never experienced pain there before, but I was not going to let that stop me. Several months later I'm still living with the consequences of that glorious, gutsy, and regrettably moronic feat. Saturday I had my third setback after another effort to gradually build up my running on a treadmill over a period of several weeks - - so it's back to square one for me! And, for the first time, I went to the doctor. His diagnosis was tendinitis or bursitis. He prescribed rest and anti-inflammatory medication. Later in the day I went to the pharmacy. I handed them my prescription. "That will be 15 to 20 minutes," I was told. During the next 20 minutes I observed about 3 people pick up their prescriptions. I was also able to thumb through two runner's magazines (looking for clues as to how people who injure themselves can rehabilitate from their injuries), one Men's Health workout guide, and a car collector's magazine that included photo shoots of undiscovered collectible cars wasting away behind people's homes in rural locations. I had exhausted the magazines that were of any remote interest, looked over the display of best selling books (who is Nora Roberts, and what in the world is she writing about in all those books?), perused the store shelves for novel items such as a nifty black eye patch that might lend me a more a distinguished look, and confirmed that this pharmacy followed the standard practice of placing their most sensitive merchandise in plain view at the front counter, clearly as a courtesy to parents who will enjoy fielding questions from their inquisitive elementary school children. After all of this, I instinctively began the "I'm waiting for my prescription" shuffle, standing in place but moving my feet from side to side, combined with intervals in which I moved about within a small circular area. After having thus performed, albeit unwittingly, an essential element of this ritual in which I had been engaged, a pharmacist sprang to action, asked my name, pointed to another pharmacist standing at a shelf, and identified that pharmacist as the one working on my prescription. Within minutes they had called my name. The head pharmacist told me they had chosen to fulfill the prescription with a generic drug, that my co-pay would be $5, that I was to take 2 pills a day, should take the pills with food, and could have one re-fill - - my doctor had told me most of these things when he wrote the prescription. I later looked in the bottle. Sure enough, there were 60 pills in there. 60 pills that most certainly had not been manufactured at the pharmacy during the 20 minute wait. They had moved 60 pills from one container into another. 20 minutes. I knew what I had been doing, and I didn't necessarily suspect that the pharmacists had been dogging it, but I couldn't begin to imagine what they had been doing during those 20 minutes. But it was not for me to ask, and with the ceremony complete and my concoction in hand, I went on my way.