A Funny Thing Happened…

I was at Walgreens (again) to pick up (yet another) prescription, and had one of the best belly-laughs I’ve had in a while. Thank heavens Macy was with me, or I might have embarrassed myself, and the pharmacist, even more.

To set the scene: I go to Walgreens a lot. They know me there, kind of like how it was for Norm on Cheers, but without the drinks and witty repartee. I have lots of prescriptions, all of which are on a slightly different schedule, so that I can’t ever manage to go pick up a month’s worth of all my drugs but instead make multiple trips every month.

Usually, there’s either a grandfatherly pharmacist or a host of young female techs. This visit, though, I found a sweet young male tech behind the register, and another sweet young male pharmacist. While these two fellas were plenty easy on the eyes and seemed competent at their jobs, I do prefer the grandfatherly pharmacist because he always calls me “miss” instead of “ma’am.” I know, it’s a farce, and I know I’m way more “ma’am” than “miss” at this stage of the game, but I like it anyway.

The young whippersnappers both referred to me as ma’am, but I’m not going to hold that against them. The young tech went to get my order, and the young pharmacist butted in to ask if I had any questions about my meds. I thanked him but said no, I’m a frequent flyer here, quite the pro at taking these drugs. He couldn’t just leave it at that, he had to be extra thorough and read the warning labels on one of the drugs, either one of my antibiotics (yes, I’m STILL on them both) or my iron supplement, I’m not sure which.

So he looked at the label and asked me, in all seriousness, if I might be pregnant or am breastfeeding. I can’t decide which scenario is most amusing: pregnant me, in all my forced-menopause hot-flashing, hormonalness; or the idea of breastfeeding with no um, breasts. Those poor sweet young men behind the counter didn’t know and can’t be blamed. And I’m pretty sure both were quite horrified when I told them, in no uncertain terms, that both scenarios are quite impossible for me and that any baby relying on me for breastfeeding would be utterly starved to pieces.

We had a good hee-haw about it, and the tech said something about the fact that I look young for a cancer patient. Shows how much he knows: there’s no mean demographic for cancer. The pharmacist said, any age is too young to be a cancer patient. And how.