Life Off-Label

Being a 5’10 female, I often get asked if I ever played basketball. I always want to be one to shatter stereotypes, but it is true.

When I was younger, I really got into basketball. I mean REALLY. Living in Illinois at the time, I got to grow up watching and idolizing Michael Jordan. Like Mike, I found a true love for basketball. I could play all day, and often did. I was on many different teams and went to a few basketball camps. Like Mike, my dad played a huge role in my development as a basketball player. He built the basketball goal that still sits in the driveway of my childhood home, and at that goal he’s played me in countless games of one-on-one. Even though he had a four hour round-trip commute to work, he somehow still found the time and energy to help coach some of my basketball teams. I never enjoyed something so much, and my competitive side wanted me to be so good at it. Like Mike, I wanted to be a professional basketball player.

Unfortunately, that flame for basketball started to flicker. After I moved to Texas, I had some coaches that were great at sucking all the fun from something I used to love so much. When it came time to sign up for high school classes, the block schedule forced me to choose between basketball and band. I also started to really enjoy playing percussion by that point. It was a tough decision, but like a true nerd, I went with band in high school.

I had a lot of fun on drumline, and I still love playing the occasional basketball game for fun, but for a long time a part of me felt like I failed at my dream. I wanted to be just like Mike, and I quit.

But since then I’ve learned my life has new dreams, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And best of all, I can still be like Mike. One of my favorite quotes by him came from his Hall of Fame speech. He said, “Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.” I try to remind myself of that all the time, and it’s inspired me to go out of my comfort zone and try new things I may not have tried before, such as running for officer positions in student organizations. I used to quit things easily because I failed the first time I tried something. And then I remember: The greatest basketball player of all time was once cut from his high school basketball team. Obviously he didn’t let that get to him, and I shouldn’t let myself feel so put down over something I don’t succeed at the first time either. Most of all, Mike has taught me to do what you love, whatever it may be. You won’t find any reward in doing something you aren’t passionate about.

So, even though I may not have become the best basketball player in the WNBA, I still wanna be like Mike.

Whatever it is you do.

I know that in some fields it’s easier to do than others. It’s easy for me to see that if I make a mistake in a pharmacy, the consequences could be detrimental, and even life-threatening. And that’s what will always keep me on my toes. But for some, say the person working in a call center or the person standing at a cash register day in and day out, it’s not always easy to see why your job matters so much and who it makes an impact on.

But I want to remind you that no matter how insignificant you may feel, the consequences of every action you take ripple out and will ultimately impact someone. You may not notice it, but it does.

The other day, I was driving from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth, a three-hour drive that I’ve taken many times before, but this particular time my car battery light came on, my check engine light came on, and my car started slowing down while I was driving on the highway. I’ll later find out that one of my belts broke, but at the time I knew I was in a situation where my car would no longer be drivable in a few seconds. I pulled over to the side of the road, and called Allstate’s Roadside Assistance for a tow truck. While on the phone, the lady on the other line (we’ll call her Betty) called a towing company for me, gave me the phone number to call them in case I needed it, and told me I should expect them within an hour.

So, there I sat. An hour passes and I don’t see a tow truck, but I give them the benefit of the doubt. After about an hour and a half, I call the towing company to confirm someone is on the way and make sure they didn’t get lost, and they inform me that Betty hadn’t faxed them any of my information, so they didn’t know where to get me. I’d have to call Allstate back to make sure the information gets sent to them, and I gave the towing company my location so someone could be on their way. I ended up waiting a total of three hours for a tow truck thanks to Betty’s mistake. An already stressful situation was made a lot worse, especially considering it was the middle of a summer day in the south and, as my luck would have it, one of the few times I didn’t have a bottle of water with me.

I try not to blame Betty too much. I get that honest mistakes happen. I also get that it’s hard for someone to feel a lot of sympathy for a mere voice on the other end of a phone call while sitting in a cubicle, making about $10 an hour, with problems of their own in life to deal with. But I wish more of the Betty’s of the world realized that the care they put into their job is just as important as the care a surgeon or scientist puts into theirs. Had the engineer who designed my car parts done a better job the situation could have been avoided altogether. Had the towing company called Allstate right away when they didn’t receive a fax, I could have been helped sooner. Had the sheriff who drove right by made a quick stop to make sure I was okay, I wouldn’t have felt so worried about sitting there for so long in the heat. We all rely on each other, and it’s important for all of us not to forget that.

If there’s one thing I wish they had stricter criteria on for pharmacy applicants, it’s pharmacy experience. Most people in my class do have some to an extent, but it always amazes me when a classmate tells me they haven’t even so much as shadowed a pharmacist before pharmacy school. Usually they have amazing grades, PCAT scores, and other extracurricular activities to make up for it, but at the end of the day there’s no substitute for pharmacy experience.

Back when I was thinking about PA school, one of the things that held me back was a lack of patient contact experience. Most schools require a minimum of 1000 hours before you apply. Considering that a PA is a second career for many people, and consequently most of your competition is full-time nurses, EMTs, anesthesia techs, and the like, 1000 hours isn’t even that much. Why do they require so much? Because it’s a very patient-oriented field and they want to know you’re completely comfortable with it. Ultimately I realized I didn’t want that much patient contact, but I’m glad I hadn’t spent time in PA school before realizing it.

On the same note, pharmacy school should require a certain number of hours in a pharmacy for applicants. It can be through volunteering, shadowing, or working as a pharmacy tech. It can be in the setting of the applicant’s choice, be it retail, hospital, compounding, etc. But it should be something.

For starters, if everyone has a certain amount of experience, We wouldn’t have as much of a need for so many IPPE hours, or we could at least be trusted to do more at our sites. I don’t know what kind of impression other P1s left before me, but every time I went to a new site, it seemed like the preceptor would assume I just randomly woke up one morning and decided to go to pharmacy school without actually setting foot in a pharmacy. And maybe that’s how it is for some students, but personally I don’t need an extensive tour of every single pharmacy I go to, as if their way of arranging the drugs is SO different from another pharmacy that I couldn’t figure it out. Nor do I need to sit there and watch everyone work as they try explaining to me what drug classes are, or how to count pills, or how to choose which size container to use. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s standing around when I know I could be doing something. So I’ve learned to bring up my past experience from the start, so my preceptor can start trusting me with more responsibilities at the site and I can actually learn something.

More importantly, however, pharmacy school is a four-year and very large financial commitment, and it’s important to know the pros and cons before getting into it. A couple posts ago, when I talked about the cynics, it was inspired by coworkers from my past job who would constantly complain about pharmacy at lunch. The nurses suck. The management sucks. The techs suck. The job saturation sucks. Robots are taking over the world, but it starts with pharmacy. Yadda yadda yadda. Every. Single. Day. And yet, I’m still so happy to be in pharmacy school and excited about being a pharmacist. It didn’t deter me from applying, and even the bashing I hear from coworkers now is not going to stop me from continuing through until graduation. I know what I’m getting into, and still see the benefit in it.

What I’ve come to realize though, is that most people apply to pharmacy school without knowing the common complaints. For example, I’ve already seen several people surprised that pharmacists don’t always work steady schedules. Well, I don’t know what made you think patients only needed their drugs between 8am and 5pm, but sorry if you were misled. I’ve already dealt with the unsteady schedule, working holidays, and up to 14-hour shifts, and even though some pharmacists do have a steady schedule, I don’t mind if mine’s not, so that’s one “con” I’m okay with. Some also didn’t realize how much the job outlook slowed down. A few years ago, people were getting cash bonuses just to work for chains, now those same chains in a lot of cities are only offering part-time floating positions. Yes, the job market is more competitive, but so is any field in this economy. I don’t mind competition, and can see other areas where pharmacy will eventually grow, so that’s another “con” I’m okay with. A few others are just now realizing that their cliche passion to “help people” includes ALL people, including some of the most unappreciative and rude human beings to ever grace the planet, and are unsure if they still want a job that deals with others so often. I know how to shrug people off, so that’s another “con” I can live with.

So, neeedless to say, some classmates are already questioning their decision and looking at other fields, and it sucks that they’re realizing it after a year of pharmacy school. It makes sense why some didn’t put much thought into it before, because as pre-pharms all we ever heard from the representatives of pharmacy schools was how pharmacy is so awesome. And pharmacy is awesome. You get to serve others and matter to patients, you usually work only 40 hour weeks, you get great pay and benefits, and its a very respectable profession. But it’s not perfect, and it takes getting out into the real world of working pharmacists to discover those imperfections and see if it’s something you still want to pursue.

Social media has revolutionized how we interact in many ways, but one of the biggest might be how much we constantly know each others’ business. I’m not complaining, as it’s something I’ve come to accept. When I share things on my Facebook, they are generally things directed to a certain group of people, but I don’t mind that everyone else can see it because I’m too lazy to go through the hassle of limiting everything for possible individual circumstances. If there was something I really didn’t want someone to see, even if they aren’t on my friends list, I just wouldn’t post it. I treat my relatively “private” profile as if anyone could see it, because in reality I have no control over someone on my friends list getting on a computer and showing someone not on my friends list something on my page. I doubt it happens often, but nevertheless it’s a possibility.

When it comes to having a blog, I have to be even more careful because it is more available to anyone and everyone. When you also throw in the fact that this blog has a professional theme, I really have to watch what I say because I could possibly jeopardize my future reputation as a pharmacist. Words are powerful. It can be a great tool to provide a loud voice in your profession, but it can also come back to bite you. All it takes is one person to take something the wrong way, even if you didn’t intend for your thoughts to come across that way.

I’m going to inevitably say something that someone doesn’t agree with. I can’t please everyone, and even within this profession, people constantly argue over various things. I just hope most people remember that “pharmacy student” is only a small part of who I am. I don’t want to be afraid of being myself to the extent that you can’t see the individual behind the words. Though I strive to have a higher standard for how I conduct myself than the general population, at the end of the day I’m still human. I don’t always take things seriously, I’m quirky, and I have flaws. Pharmacy school is one of those key times in my life where I’m going to learn a lot and experience many new things, and I can learn a lot about myself by going back through old entries and seeing how my perspective has changed. I’d rather go back to read something and go, “Wow… I was silly!” than have nothing to reflect on at all.

I have many different interests and talents outside the world of pharmacy, and some of those might entail things that don’t involve being very professional. Though I may have some funny drunk pictures on Facebook, or the mouth of a sailor in reaction to a sports game on my Twitter feed, I would never let those traits overlap into how I function in a pharmacy setting. As long as I can keep my work and play time separate, I don’t see the harm. As pharmacists, we’re supposed to have great social skills and be able to interact well with others, and I don’t see how upholding some uptight professional attitude in all walks of life will do that. It’s not who I am, and if you don’t like it, feel free to take your prescription to the robot at Walgreens.

You know who they are. They’re why your two-hour road trip feels like eight. They’re why you don’t watch sports with certain friends. They’re the buzzkills of life. They’re everywhere, and the world of pharmacy isn’t immune to them.

But here’s the thing… the ones in pharmacy are the ones who have the least to complain about. Yes, I’m calling you out, you middle-aged doom and gloom party poopers. You only had to get a bachelors degree, you graduated with FAR less debt, and you still get to ride the six-figure salary train with the rest of us. When the PharmD was standardized, nobody said you had to go back to school. You got to enjoy the fruits of increased wages and bonuses during the shortage, and now that things have died down a bit you think things are heading for the worst.

I mean, do you know how many bachelor degrees pay six figures? Not many. Even if your job was heaving piles of cow manure into a fan that only splatters it back in your face, you should be happy because you’re making six figures with a friggin’ bachelors degree. You know what I was doing with my bachelors degree? Working as a pharmacy tech. Does that sounds pathetic to you? I have friends with bachelors degrees that have even worse jobs with worse pay. And in this economy, we’re all supposed to sit here and pat ourselves on the back for even having a job at all.

So, sorry if I can’t really empathize with all of your complaints. You sound like that spoiled kid in high school who thinks it’s weird that not everyone’s parents can buy them a car. You don’t really know how bad it is for others.

The younger generation of students and pharmacists are going through a minimum of six, but more often 8 or more years of school to get our PharmDs. Most of us will also graduate with a lot of student loan debt, many in the six-figure range, so even though we’ll be making the same good money as our elders, it won’t seem like as much when we’re putting away so much of our paychecks to pay our loans back. Yet we don’t seem to be complaining so much.

Maybe it’s because my generation has a different perspective. Pharmacy has its own issues, especially on the retail side of things, but no job is perfect. Personally, I’m glad I’ve worked those crappy grocery store jobs all those years in high school and undergrad, because it gave me such an appreciation for pharmacy. Many jobs have difficult customers, lazy coworkers, stressful situations, cranky bosses, etc. But how many do you get to be so important and get paid so well for doing it? Not many, but pharmacy is one of them.

Perhaps knowing the obstacles we face, we’re more willing to look to the different opportunities pharmacy has to offer. So what if a robot can dispense a few pills quicker than a human? When it comes to whose better at counseling, unless you have the personality of a leafblower, a pharmacist should win. We also know the power of social networking and technology, and we’re generally very good at both. Wherever one door closes, another might open where we could utilize our skills in those areas.

I get it though. I’m just a student. Even though I have a fair amount of experience under my belt, I’ve really just dipped my feet in pharmacy’s waters. I don’t know what it’s like to work the same job for 30 years and feel burned out. And maybe it doesn’t matter how good the job is anyway. Most people are just naturally prone to being cynical after a certain point of time. But I hope not, and I’m going to remain optimistic that I won’t become one of them.