America, Land of the Free and the All Powerful Medical Degree

My oldest son got sent home from school today with an ear infection. I ruminate to him about how lucky we are to live in a country where I can take him to a doctor and get his medicine, instead of watching helplessly while his ear throbs and his fever heats up. Secretly I miss the third world country I grew up in, since when I needed antibiotics my mother would walk me down to the local pharmacy and pick one out. Simple. But this is America. We believe in progress, freedom of speech, and the right of the common man to drive to the closest Walmart and buy a gun. We do, however, lock our nasal decongestants behind counters and we need a medical degree to correctly identify an ear infection.

My pediatrician is in the process of achieving sainthood and actually stays late on a Friday to see my son and dash off the coveted prescription. I was dreading sitting in our local urgent care next to middle-aged men with missing fingers, chunky coughing kids, and the scariest of all: silent shaking old women. I pay my $30 co pay with only a smidge of irritation. For a bonus, my son gets a free dose of Advil, which the doctor recommends I pick up for his throbbing ear. I resist the urge to grab a stack of her prescription pads which I see lying unattended on our way out. The system works, I repeat to myself. Really. It works.

I drive to the pharmacy and deposit the precious prescription. It'll be a fifteen minute wait, they tell me, so I run and pick up my other kids from daycare. You see, modern women don't have fifteen minutes to wait. We must fill the time with an errand, an important phone call, a Facebook post about our lives, or, at the least, a quick game of Angry Birds.

Back at the pharmacy I face the extremely unpleasant task of getting all three kids out of the car and ready to enter the public eye. "No crying, hitting, or name calling!" I also expect the kids to behave decently. We march through the store and to the pharmacy counter, narrowly escaping the ever tempting candy and toy displays littered along our path. I lean onto the counter, placing my hands on an ad for a new diabetes medication. I have to move a display of Jelly Beans in order to read the word diabetes. I note the irony of this to the clerk. I receive a blank look in return. I rescue my daughter from a falling stand of reading glasses which surely would have caused instant death, almost break my no name calling rule, then turn back to the clerk, whose look has gone from blank to annoyed. "Your prescription is not ready yet."

We wander up and down the aisles, looking for Advil. There it is! At $7.99 for a small bottle, I decide my son's ear will be just fine with the off-brand Tylenol we have at home that may or may not be a couple months past its expiration date. I check back with clerk. Nothing. The boys spend the next twenty minutes arguing about whether or not the Spiderman Band-Aids could beat up the Batman Band-Aids. My daughter tries on every pair of reading glasses. I stare with envy at a slutty blonde woman waiting for her prescription. She has cellulite free legs, porn stars tits, and obviously spent more than 30 seconds fixing her hair. When the staring becomes awkward, we move over to the ice cream aisle and I try to speed up the Advil’s fever lowering powers by placing my son in the freezer for a few seconds.

When they finally call our name forty-five minutes later, an apologetic pharmacist comes over to let me know that the delay was due to the insurance company calling and rejecting the prescription. She then had to host a war by proxy which culminated in my now canonized pediatrician triumphing over evil PPO and succeeding in getting the liquid gold Amoxicillin into the hands of the sick. I demand it be watermelon flavored. I thump down ice cream for the kids and vodka for myself onto the counter. I try to make one more lame joke to the apparently lobotomized clerk. I feel superior when the blond bimbo returns the counter to ask if she left her keys there. She can’t get into her car. Smugly I pat my front jeans pocket where my car keys bulge attractively like a… well, this is a pg rated blog. OK, I may not be the kind of sexy that has middle-aged women staring at me jealously in CVS, but at least I have quick access to my car keys and my Darth Vader keychain.

Finally, more than two hours after my son came home with an ear ache, I have succeeded in my mom-duty of navigating the health care system and getting his medicine. After strapping three kids into their NHTSA approved child safety seats, dutifully picking up the McDonald’s wrappers that scattered from my car when I opened the doors, resisting the wild urge to bum a cigarette off of the creepy guy who is always standing outside the store smoking, and also resisting the urge to back over that same damn blonde who cuts me off in her BMW as I try to back out of my parking spot, we finally make it home. Time to update my Facebook status.