Well, you have to understand where the pharmacist is coming from. I have a friend who is a pharmacist in another state. A rando customer who rocks up to the pharmacy for a shot, is highly disruptive to the workflow. Pharmacists are insanely overworked, overscheduled and overburdened. A strike might be the only way they’d get their lunch hour. Their favorite people are the vaccine sceptics and hesitant. Fewer shots administered means the pharmacists can concentrate on filling prescriptions and other stuff. Now here comes a sh|thead who will actually pay $478 to disrupt their day… eff that guy! Why isn’t he like those nice folks who will refuse to get a vaccine and never disrupt their day!
Of course the pharmacist is irritated. But he’s also wrong. Because if fewer people get vaccines, it doesn’t mean their work load is suddenly lower. What will happen instead, is that the staff will be cut yet again, to accomodate the fewer customers, and the pharmacist is back to exactly the same level of overwhelmed. He doesn’t understand that it’s not my fault that he’s overwhelmed, but pure economics, and that if I and people like me were to die in a fire as he wishes, he’d be no better off. Now, I’m not about to stand there and try to explain that I’m not at fault and it’s just the system, because faced with a concrete person, that’s where the hostility will focus, not on an abstract economic arrangement. The system sets us against each other.
Same with doctors who have only about 15 minutes per patient. Sure, it’s easy to be irritated by old Bob the patient who is slow and vague when explaining his symptoms while the clock is ticking. Or younger George the patient who is full of questions, when the doctor has a waiting room full of anxious customers. I kid you not - a couple of years ago, I went for my yearly physical and the intake nurse was about to weigh me and take my BP - I was taking off my heavy coat, otherwise what’s the point of stepping on the scale, and she was visibly irritated, cause she wanted go, go, go, go onto the next one. When it was time to take my BP, I loosened my tie and unbuttoned the top button on my shirt, because I had almost run straight from my office to make it on time and my pulse was still high - I kid you not, she literally rolled her eyes, even though she tried to turn her head away. She was just absolutely frazzled. That’s how you get hostile ways of relating even though it was neither my fault nor hers that the burden on healthcare providers personnel is set up intentionally to be so high for economic reasons. Instead we take it out on each other - doctors on patients, patients on doctors, nurses against doctors, doctors against admins etc., etc., etc. But it’s the system all along.
That is why I try to be extra nice and patient with everyone in healthcare, because hostility gets us nowhere. I don’t burden the doc, or the nurse, I try to make their jobs as easy as possible. I do my homework, and come prepared, I understand the protocol and the limitations of what can and cannot be done.
Above all, it is you who is responsible for your health. You can’t outsource that to a doctor or any other human being. Educate yourself, show initiative and determination, cause nobody else will on your behalf. The resources are out there - including this fabulous site. YMMV.
