I'm Gonna Devise a Virus, to Bring Dire Straits to Your Environment

Just returned from the doctor's office about an hour ago. I've been diagnosed with some sort of viral infection. (The actual specific disease remains mysterious and unknown). I'm to take an antibiotic, drink juice and sleep, which seems to be the basic course of treatment for every disease other than tuberculosis and leprosy. (For tuberculosis, of course, you're also instructed to walk around coughing up blood into a frilly handkerchief, as everyone knows).

I've been feeling kind of sick for the past three days, but it only got acute yesterday. My joints and muscles hurt, which is a weird feeling, particularly for me as I so rarely use them. I mean, it's not like my joints are going to hurt from vigorous exercize. Nope, only the Venezuelan Monkey Flu.

The worst part is that, when you feel this sick, all you want to do is lie in bed. But you can't, because you have to go to the doctor. So I haul my ass out of bed, shower and get down to Santa Monica to the doctor's office. But, of course, they won't see you right away, so you wind up in a waiting room for an hour.

Here's a question: Isn't the doctor's waiting room a horrifying incubator of disease? You're basically telling all the sick people in an area to coalesce together in one room, breathing on one another, for upwards of 60 minutes at a time. Usually, this doesn't bother me, because I'm already sick in the first place if I'm there, but what about healthy people accompanying the sick? Or the healthy people who work there? Doesn't make sense to me.

So after the 30 minutes of waiting-room waiting, I get shown into the back for the 30 minutes of alternate, private-room waiting. This is better, in that I don't have to listen to loud, snotty children any more, but also worse, in that there are no magazines in the smaller room and I'm asked to put on a thin little robe that amply shows off my hideous back fat. Also, it's friggin' cold in there.

Finally, the doctor gets in to see me and it takes, I'd say, about 2 minutes for him to figure out what's wrong with me and prescribe medication. It took so little time once the doctor actually arrived, this could been a drive-thru service.

[MUFFLED VOICE]: "What do you have?"
ME: Um, coughing, sore joints, general fatigue, sinus pain.
[MUFFLED VOICE]: Okay, that'll be one anti-viral infection anti-biotic. Drive up to the second window.

But here's the best part of the doctor visit experience. Once it's over, you still can't just go home and sleep. No, you've got to go wait in line at the pharmacy to fill your prescription. And I don't want to come down hard on those with chronic illnesses, but it seems that every time I have to go have a prescription filled, I get stuck behind some sickly moron who takes 10 days just to drop off the slip at the counter.

"Okay, so, you have all three of my prescriptions? Do these need to be refrigerated? Do I have a refill? What do I do if I lose them? Is this going to conflict with the 8 other medicatons I'm taking? Hang on, let me list them all off for you in excrucating detail..."

And even then, once you're done waiting in the long line at the pharmacy, you're still not done. No, you have to go back and pick up your prescriptions an hour later.

Do I have any pharmacist readers? Because I would seriously love an explanation for this. I bring you a sheet that says I'm supposed to take 10 doses of this or that antibiotic. Isn't it just a matter of going into the back, finding the big bottle of that antibiotic, and counting out the right number of pills? I mean, I know you guys have special schools you attend and all that, and that you're qualified to discuss the drugs and their effects with customers, but isn't that really the essence of the job? I mean, if I don't need you to answer any questions, aren't you essentially just pill-counters?

I don't mean any offense. My job is certainly more brainless than being a pharmacist. But I don't understand what takes an hour. (And if the answer is just constant backlog, shouldn't the place just hire more pharmacists?)

So, I'll have to take off yet again for the local shopping center in a few minutes to pick up my antibiotic, which I'd identify by name if I could remember or spell the thing. But that's a whole different rant for another time - why all antibiotics have names that sound like French films.

"New from Claire Denis...a heart-wrenching tale of love and abandonment...The hit of this year's Cannes Film Festival...Emmanuelle Beart and Vincent Cassel star in...Ammoxicillan."