Monday, June 23, 2014

The Dog ate my Homework. Also my Vicodin.

There are probably a lot of nurse's stations that feature a little shrine like this:


The nurses have to field a lot of requests for early refills on controlled substances.  Many are legitimate.  People who are on a regimen of pain control meds do after all sometimes develop acute conditions such as kidney stones and broken arms.  A few of the reasons given take a little more consideration.  Here are a few that were offered up:


The first one gets points for honesty.  The second one, well, perhaps for creativity.


Hmmm.  The writing on the second note might be hard to make out, but the comment was "I was shaking so bad, my pills all fell down the drain".  This might be realistic for a Parkinson's patient. There are of course other reasons for people calling for early med refills to be shaking.


Ah, the Classics.  Dogs seem to enjoy prescription drugs.  And the top one made me smile.  I can assure you there is nothing more buoyant than a bottle full of pills.  Assuming it was sealed.  Now, if you were taking the pills while out boating I guess that may have something to do with the subsequent sinking...

All kidding aside health care professionals have a difficult job to do here.  People in pain need to be helped.  But at the same time the unfortunate tendency of the healthcare system to toss habit forming drugs around too freely needs to be controlled.

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