When I opened my independent pharmacy in 1776, I had worked for a regional chain pharmacy and after working for them for ~ 3 yrs, I was promoted to pharmacy/store manager. I was told that I was the youngest manager in their 100+ yr history. One+ year later, there was some changes at the chain and I decided to move on. I went to work for a franchisee of a national pharmacy chain of apothecary sized pharmacies – their stores were abt 1200 sq ft.
Come to find out the franchisee was in deep debt and owed the franchisor a lot of money. I had befriended the person who was supervisor for the territory my store was in for the Franchisor.
After working there for a few months, one Saturday another guy – that I knew from HQ- came into the pharmacy on a Saturday. I asked the guy from corporate – “why are you working on Saturday”. The Franchisor HQ was in Milwaukee,WI.
He told me that they had called the Franchisee owner to Milwaukee to discuss a new promotional program, BUT the Franchisor was taking over the franchised pharmacies that he owned and the President of the Franchisor would be in next week to have a meeting with all the pharmacists working for this franchisee and the President instructed the HQ guy to have the locksmith that was with him to change all the locks in all the stores and to GIVE YOU KEYS TO ALL THE STORES!
At that meeting the following week, I was told that I was being promoted to Regional Director for the KY stores. After a couple of years, I decided if I had to work this hard, maybe I should have my own pharmacy and get rid of all the headaches of being a “regional supervisor” and just open my little “one man pharmacy in 1976”. I found a vacant store front – abt 1200 sq ft – in a strip shopping center.
Over the following 20 yrs, we expanded into Home Medical Equipment (HME), bought the strip shopping center (23,000sq ft) and expanded our 1200 sq ft in the shopping center to about 5,000 sq ft and a off premise 2800 Sq ft warehouse to store, maintain, repair our rental inventory of HME equipment, and my “little one man pharmacy” had 18 employees.
Turning those years, I developed the work philosophy, “LEAD, FOLLOW, or GET THE HELL OUT OF MY WAY”
Barb and I are finding ourselves in the same place as many other chronic pain pts. Our PCP of almost 30 years has told us that he is retiring at the end of 2026. I fondly refer to our PCP as a Dr Marcus Welby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Welby,_M.D.
Barb is like most of the intractable chronic pain pts, she doesn’t have the stamina to fight on. We have already had three MDs tell us that “they are not comfortable” and two of them are in the same practice that our PCP is in and they have nearly 30 yrs of medical records on us.
I have reached out to a handful of other individuals who claim that they are chronic pain advocates, that I thought would be the most receptive to considering some different paths. So far their responses have been UNDERWHELMING – in fact it has been ZERO! Wasn’t it Einstein’s quote that doing the save thing over and over and expected a different outcome, was his definition of INSANITY.
So it looks like I have to fall back on my previous SOP: “LEAD, FOLLOW, or GET THE HELL OUT OF MY WAY”
The practitioner that cut that woman’s opioids down to 1/3 of what she was taking and put a
My mind is already laying out what has to be done, and very little of it is what has been tried in the past. Some may end up calling me CRAZY, but I am taking going to stay away from paths toward INSANITY!
Filed under: General Problems
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Necessity is the mother of invention. I say do what you need to do. If nothing else is working, what is there to lose? As of late, my time has largely gone to trying not to end up homeless again and helping my mom navigate the mandated switch to Medicare Advantage with UHC so she doesn’t lose her doctor after her recent cancer diagnosis. Still, if there is something I can do for you, I am all ears. I am, unfortunately, not an advocate, but I would be happy to try. I would have liked to have joined the fight, I just have too much going on behind the screen, so to speak, to commit to it. I try not to start any project when I know I won’t be able to dedicate time to it. I have been told that is selfish, but I don’t think I’d be of much good to anyone if I were to have to live in a vehicle with my family again. That requires day to day planning and operations that are difficult to imagine if one has not been in that particular situation in this day and age where the homeless are so despised. Especially when telling people that you can’t work due to physical limitations and debilitating pain is met with accusations of “having lots of excuses”. You’d think people would have compassion for a family with 2 members that are disabled. That’s not at all what we found and, sadly, it wouldn’t be any better with one having a cancer diagnosis. The collective sentiment was “If you REALLY wanted a home, you would do whatever you had to in order to get back into one”. Sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it? I distinctly remember being told that if I REALLY wanted pain relief, then I would do/try whatever was necessary to get it. Which just so happened to include expensive injections that provided no discernible relief and medications that actually made things worse instead of better. That said, if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know. I will make time to help a friend.