The little things that will twist your mind...

Twenty years I've been working for a pharmaceutical company, doing pre-clinical drug safety research.
Twenty years--a major part of that time building cancer drugs.

Tonight, I just spent 20 minutes on the phone with some telephone tech answering the phone at the company mail-order pharmacy, feeding her the information off my insurance cards and the lists of my doctors and their phone numbers--justifying, to this woman I've never met, why I deserve to have them waive their arbitrary rule that they alone must fill my Xeloda prescription.

I told them that I'm stage IV, that my treatment (radiation + Xeloda) begins on Monday, that there's no way that I'd be able to get any drugs which they tried to mail-order to me.

And they put me on hold.

And then, after my local pharmacy was closed, at 9:04 p.m., the telephone tech came back on and told me that yes, because of this special circumstance, out of the goodness of their hearts they would approve this ONE-TIME exception and authorize the local pharmacy to dispense a 30-day supply so that can start my radiation + Xeloda treatment on Monday.

On Christmas Eve.

Everything else I have to go through and put up with, and now I'm justifying my oncologist's treatment plan to a pharmacy tech in some phone center in Florida, because my pharmaceutical company has contracted for the worst prescription coverage in the western world.

And now tomorrow, I have to call the pharmacy back and they have to resubmit the scrip.

Hell, I probably should have called Elliot Siegal direct.