Customers That Will Give You Blisters

I’m a doctor, working at a public night shift service. It’s kind of like an emergency room but for non-emergencies, to keep the hospitals clear of white codes. We treat anything from a fever to a sore throat to prescriptions for urgent treatments.

A woman walks in at 3:00 am asking for a prescription for hypertension drugs, which isn’t unusual, as people sometimes don’t notice they’re running low.

The law (not a rule, not my decision — the law) states that our service can only write prescriptions for potentially life-threatening conditions’ drugs for a maximum of seventy-two hours’ coverage, so if you take one pill a day, I can only prescribe you a single blister.

While I’m writing the prescription, she casually mentions:

Customer: “I’m an insomniac. I was cleaning the medicine cabinet and I realized I’m down to my last full blister.”

My pen stops and I ask her to repeat.

Me: “Full blister?”

Customer: “Yeah.”

I void the prescription and explain to her the law. She gets mad, starts yelling, and threatens to call the cops.

Me: “Go ahead.”

The cops come, and she triumphantly announces:

Customer: “He is refusing to treat me!”

I explained the situation, and they asked her if it was true that she had a full blister. She, of course, confirmed it. The cops looked at her — still with her look of triumph, waiting for them to arrest me — then at me, and then ask her politely to leave, as I was in the right. She was livid.

The day after, my boss called me and cracked up because she went back during the day to talk to “the manager”, and my boss told her the exact same thing. Never saw her again.