Musings during break

I've been working a ton the last week and a half, and I fell back into the swing of things pretty quickly. Unfortunately, the more time I spend at my home store, the more I hate it. Since I started working there (early-mid 2008), we've had a ton of staff turn-over. We're up to 8 staff pharmacists in that time, plus a ton of techs. I work in a fairy ritzy suburb with a very demanding client base, and my store consistently does poorly on various customer survey parameters set by corporate. We've tried everything, and very little has helped. The current PIC basically carried out a coup d'etat last year to remove my old boss, and many hailed her as the answer to all of our problems. (The old partner was unwillingly made PIC at another store in May during a big run-around). Surprisingly enough, we still have bad scores. I've made countless suggestions to my fellow techs, to all of the pharmacists, and to our pharmacy and general district managers, and they consistently are ignored. I wouldn't mind half as much if our 38-going-on-12 PIC didn't trash me behind my back to techs and pharmacists who tell me. Don't complain when you treat me like crap and I find hours elsewhere. In general, I really don't mind working  for this company, especially since they have locations everywhere and can be very flexible about hours. Right now, the part-time pharmacist (with whom I work every Friday night) is the only thing keeping me at this store. Let's hope for some changes in the new year.

Holidaze

I worked 47 hours this week and am working another 40 this week. Exhausted! But going on vacation on January 4th- just need to get to that point :-)
Here's my favorite holiday song (well, one of them). If you celebrate, happy Christmas to you! Otherwise, bugger off...just kidding! Happy day off or time-and-a-half to you instead.

In Sickness

My group of friends from high school is pretty great. There are 8 of us in total and we've been pretty close since 9th grade- miraculously, we got even closer during college when we were all scattered. We now have our first group tragedy. One of my friend's mothers is about to die from advanced cancer. We don't even have any divorced parents among us (pretty lucky, I know!). It's so hard, because we don't know how to handle it. We're trying to put together a meal train, but it seems like we should be doing more as her best friends. It sounds so selfish to say we feel helpless, but we do! I don't even know how to bring it up when we talk, but now her mom has taken a turn for the worst. Her mom is like our den mom- she planned birthday parties, prom activities, and shore trips. It just sucks, for lack of a better word. Keep us all in your thoughts, especially during the holidays, and thank your higher power for all of the healthy people in your life.

Tours

I took a tour of one of the pharmacy schools in my city today. It's a pretty well-known university with a relatively new pharmacy program (keeping in mind that we're a saturated city!). So luckily, their admission stats are a little lower than the others (meaning I stand a chance to get in- keeping in mind that I have an abysmal GPA). The tour itself was quite boring, as tours generally go, but they did tell me that if I were accepted, I could finish some prereqs in the summer, so that's good.

Phone Calls

The company I work for puts out automated calls prompting people to refill or pick up their prescriptions. I'm assuming this lady thought I was a computer...
Me: Hi, I'm calling from the pharmacy, is Emily Post there?
Little Kid: Hold on. Mommy, the pharmacy is on the phone!
Emily Post: Oh. Just hang up.
Click. Guess we won't get your new insurance info, lady.
On an unrelated note, for those in America, PBS is re-broadcasting series (season) one of Downton Abbey this week! It might be my favorite show. I can't wait until the Christmas episode! The second season doesn't air until January here, but my friend and I (clever girls that we are) figured out a way to watch it online when the new episodes aired in Britain in the early fall. It's been so hard not to spoil it for our other friends!

Done!

The developmental bio final took 3 hours. I don't think I've ever taken a test that was 3 hours, uninterrupted, just writing. I hurt everywhere. Amazingly, it wasn't AS bad as I'd thought. Out of 170 pts, I was hesitant on about 25, but obviously I won't get zero points on those parts! So if I come away with a B, I'll "B" a happy camper (ha!)
Anyone have any fun break plans? I'm working nonstop for 2.5 weeks then I'm off to a sunny vacation :-)

Four down...

One to go! Only developmental left. Naturally, the two liberal arts ones were easy, the two sciences were hard. Oh well. I'm a senior...it's all good, right?


Gulp.

Options

Today I had a very interesting conversation with my dentist (well, mostly he did the talking. Obviously). He was telling me about how he had started in a DMD/PhD program, but his university lost funding midway through. He could have tried funding himself, but as OMDG will tell you, that isn't always easy, so he bowed out of the PhD portion. He sounded like he was a little sad about it, but in general, everything turned out ok. Ultimately, what you want to do at 21 is not necessarily what you want to do at 31 or 41 or 51. This is probably the biggest thing driving me to pharmacy (as opposed to med school). I like the idea that I could work in industry for a while, and then settle in somewhere else later in life. Of course, this could be done as a physician, but from my perspective, there's a lot less flexibility, especially after your residency. Plus there's the debt factor- I would probably feel obligated to take the best job I could right away to start chopping down the loans. Theoretically, they would be much smaller as a PharmD. Pharmaceutical research is my interest anyway. At least for now.

Insane Customer Interactions

Mrs. Perturbed, on the phone: "Are you aware that someone from your store called me twenty minutes ago to tell me you were out of stock on a drug? AND THEN left me a message ten minutes ago to tell me that they now DO have the drug?"
Me: "Umm. Yeah, I vaguely remember someone calling you. So all's well that ends well, you can come today instead of tomorrow if you want. Or not." (what had happened was that we did an RTS from someone else)
Perturbed: "Well, YOU PEOPLE need to look harder!"
--half an hour later, Perturbed is in the store--
Perturbed: "YOU PEOPLE messed up my prescription! My doctor is John Smith! I don't know who this JAY SMITH is!"
Me: "Well, no, look. His name is John Jay Smith. It has his full name, see?"
Perturbed: "You don't know what you're talking about!" --leaves in a huff--
Meanwhile, the pharmacist and my partner tech stood in the corner laughing their tails off.

Productivity

I took off of work this weekend to study for finals...and haven't gotten much of anything done. Whomp. If anyone has any focusing strategies or tips, send them my way!

Do-Overs

I have never been one to beg teachers for extensions or breaks, and I never tolerated kids who did that. I'm also not a point-grubber. If I get something wrong, I read where the teacher is coming from and I learn from the mistake. If the question was SO egregious, the teacher almost always notices anyway and makes it void.
But then today happened. We had to do a "morphometrics" project for my developmental biology class. It was assigned just as we were leaving for Thanksgiving break, and to be honest, I knew then that it wouldn't be started until the night before it was due (i.e. last night). I have had the busiest two weeks, and since we had a major group project due earlier this week, I devoted myself to that.
Last night (erm...around 11:30), I decided to get started. The assignment was only two pages long- how bad could it be? Nightmare. We had to use this software called image J, and none of my data made sense. The directions for the second part said to use a CD that I wasn't sure we were given. A few texts/calls later, I found out some classmates also had no clue. I came in early today, and we made no progress. So I handed in what little data I had, embarrassed and stuck. After class, I swallowed my pride and went to the professor's office. I told her that I don't know where I went wrong, but I felt like I needed to know this for the final, and I'd take my loss on the project. Yeah, it was uncomfortable, and yeah, she chastised me for waiting (and for not writing some extra directions in my notes)...but then she said I could redo it and email her. What. A. Relief. I still don't understand 100% of the assignment, but I feel like now I could at least get an A or B on it (boy does my grade need it). So new lesson- take a chance once in a while. It helps that I'm not a class pest, I think. I might not always have the top grades, but I think that in general, professors tend to like me. For that, I sleep better at night.

Hump Day

This week is on a steep slope. Latin quiz was easy. Project was annoying but not too mentally taxing. Today's quizzes will be hard. So will tomorrow's quiz and project due, and I'll also have two annoying paper rewrites due

The Next Two Weeks.

I need a nap already...
In case you were wondering, here's my classes this semester:
Microbio + Lab. Intro to Political Science. Organic Chem 1 + Lab. Intermediate Latin I. Developmental Biology + Lab. So ready to be done with it!

Sometimes I Know Things

Today's microbiology lecture topic was antibiotics. Sounds perfect, right? Ugh. It's known to be a rather droll class- just straight lecture from PPT for an hour. The professor is allergic to penicillin, so he decided to make that a big feature of the lecture. On the slide titled "Cephalosporins," he wrote "Can be used in patients with penicillin allergy." BAM. To be honest, I'm not doing that well in the class, but I'll be darned if I haven't learned this much working four years in retail. So I went to him after class and casually mentioned "Hey, I thought first-generation cephs had a 10% cross-over with patients with PCN allergies?" His reply? Essentially, "I don't really know." And turned away and kept packing his computer! I stood there gaping like a fish for a while, then thanked him and left. What the heck am I paying this guy's salary for?! Then I went to my political science class and had a great class-wide debate on national health care, which made up for it.
Then I went to work, where I got to fight with some guy who wanted a free replacement bottle of cefdinir suspension because he dropped the first one and it broke (those things are like $100!), and then some lady wanted to know the manufacturing locations of all sorts of OTC meds, brand and generic, because "she doesn't want ones not made in America, and she has the right to know." But hey, the good outweighs the bad 95% of the time

And So It Begins

Ah, how to begin a blog? It's a tricky thing, so I suppose I'll start at the beginning. My name is  I (well, that's short for something), and I'm a senior at Big Catholic U. For most of my life, I've wanted to be a physician. I've pretty much planned everything around medical school from the time I was in preschool. Recently, I've had a MAJOR change of heart and am now gung-ho pharmacy. I've worked in a pharmacy for nearly four years, and my parents' best friends E & J are both pharmacists (E works retail, J is in industry). But perhaps one of the biggest driving factors is another life-long dream of mine: to live in London. I don't mean as a study abroad student or a wayward backpacking youth. I'm genuinely looking to queue up with my groceries at Tesco on my way home to my flat to watch Mock the Week. Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to get a UK work visa without a UK/EU passport. To that end, I've established a plan that would take roughly five years. Step 1, pharmacy school. There's one on the opposite end of my state that has an accelerated 3-year program; failing that, we have two schools in my area that I could apply for next year. Step 2, apply for a 1-year master's program in the UK. There are lots of great schools. I've always had a great interest in public health (it was my minor for a while, but that's another story), so LSHTM would be superb, but I'd take nearly anything. If you have a UK degree, you're eligible for a work visa, so then I could go from there. There are a ton of pharmaceutical companies in the UK with headquarters or branches in my US hometown, so hopefully I could work for one over there for a while and transfer back eventually.Of course you might think, "Hey, I, you could do this as a physician, no?" To be honest, I thought of that. But as my best friend M told me, "pharmacy is [my] passion, for better or worse." Plus, from a pragmatic sense, pharmacy would leave me with a lot less baggage: theoretically fewer years of school to accrue debt, no residency required, and if I needed to, I could easily work for a few years, pay off the loans, and then finish part 2 of the plan.
Unfortunately, I'm facing a bit of an uphill battle getting there. This blog will follow that road, along with my love of politics (American and British), TV shows, attempts to stay fashionable, get in shape, eat healthy, travel the world, and anything else that pops into my head. (I also enjoy using proper grammar, not that you'd know it by that last sentence. Awkward verb sequence, much?)