All Played Out

The Hula-gen’s love games. We play them a lot. The other night we played Apples to Apples and Catch-Phrase until one of us laughed so hard she almost fell off of the ottoman. I mean, come one, what isn’t funny about trying to get someone to say “hemorrhoids”? And before Christmas we hosted a party of married folks and played The Newlywed Game. Oh my. Even though there weren’t any whoopee questions in the stack it didn’t take long for the game to go THERE, and we certainly learned a lot about each other. A little too much. As in I kept thinking about that old Lewis Grizzard quote, “Damn brother, I don’t think I’d have told THAT.”

Yes, we play all kinds of games around here. Some of the most fun include, Let’s Eat at Cracker Barrel for the 50th Time This Year, Where Did Papa T. Hide His Hearing Aid Batteries This Time and the wildly popular Who Wants to Rub Mama J.’s Feet. Our newest game? Straightening out Mama J.’s and Papa T.’s medication. Because my marriage contract with Hubby requires me to handle anything involving a spatula or insurance companies, I’m the lucky one who gets to play this round. (We’re still searching for the foot rubbing clause as it is apparently in the fine print. Until we find it, that’s been pawned off onto Teen Angel. Merry Christmas, baby.)

I spent an hour and a half last night sorting through their pills. Between them, they have twenty-one prescriptions. Three months ago, they started ordering them from a drug company, and my sister-in-law placed that order. As she is currently playing the game Hiding out in the Next County, I needed to place the next order before their medicine ran out. Using her old notes and a couple of bottles, I finally figured out that each bottle contained a code and an order date that would make the process pretty simple. Except Mama J. didn’t have most of the original bottles. She has some kind of funky system where she pours some of the pills into smaller old bottles, which may or may not have the same name on them, and doles out weekly batches and then daily batches of medication. When the big bottle is empty, she throws it away. You know, the bottle with the date and prescription code. After searching through some drawers and cabinets, she was finally able to dig up enough of the original bottles for me to piecemeal together a list of medications we needed to order now, some I thought we might need to order and others we need to order at the end of the month. I also asked her to save the original bottles from now on. She gave me an I Don’t like It Because It Messes up My System but I’ll Do It Anyway Look and agreed. She also brushed off our concerns that perhaps keeping the pills in their original bottles would keep her from killing Papa T. with an accidental overdose of Singulair. That woman likes to live on the edge she does.

I spent a great deal of time on the phone this morning with a very nice man from Medco who obviously knew how to play Let Me Help You Order Medicine for Old People Even Though You Don’t Have All of the Necessary Information. He listened patiently while I explained that I didn’t know when some of it needed to be ordered, if there were any refills left on some of the medications and that Mama J.’s and Papa T.’s drug cards didn’t have the extremely important patient ID number on them. You can’t do anything without that ID number as proven to me by the internet when I tried to place the order online first thing this morning. After gleaning enough information from me to determine that I was not trying to steal their identities in order to illegally order some Oxycontin for myself, he waded through their list of pills with me and figured out what needed to be ordered, told me how many refills were left on each one and gave me the ID number. And then I promised to bear his first child.

Having taken care of the order, I then turned to the web to register Mama J. and Papa T. online so I could place the future orders online. But the website, once again, just mocked me and laughed at my numerous attempts to provide it with an email address and password. It slapped me around for a while, called me ugly names and punted me from the registration page like a hound dog that had shat on the porch. I called the help line, and after waiting twenty-five minutes, I reached Miss Nasty Attitude who was playing I Don’t Want to Be Bothered by You Today. She told me that I was not authorized to talk to her about the account. I explained that just yesterday Mama J. had spoken to someone at Medco who assured her that they had received the paperwork allowing information about the account to be released to us. Miss Nasty Attitude then asked me to put Papa T. on the phone, which I couldn’t do because I wasn’t at his house. She told me to have him send in the appropriate paperwork and then she’d be glad to discuss it with me. I explained that we had already done that and that I wasn’t hanging up until we had worked out this mess. She insisted that I was wrong, kept interrupting me and wouldn’t let me finish a sentence. At one point she told me to go home and double check his ID card because he had likely given me the wrong number. I explained that I checked it myself last night because HE HAS ALZHEIMER’S SWEET MOTHER OF MABEL, and she still wouldn’t help me. I came this close to losing my Attitude of Gratitude bracelet, but I managed to keep my cool. I was very polite, even when I explained that her ascertation that Medco did not have our paperwork was bullshi*t and that perhaps I should speak to her manager. In a sudden fit of kindness she explained that all I probably needed to do was alter the password. I did, and it worked. And then I vowed to put a hex on her first born. Just kidding. Kind of.

So now, it’s all set up so that we can log on at any time and get their prescription information. And the next time we need to order anything, it will take just a few clicks of the mouse. After three rounds, I win. The prize? I get to skip the next game of Who’s Going to Take Papa T. To The Foot Doctor To Get His Toenails Trimmed.