Raise your hand if you’re pulling all your Rxs from CVS
Okay, friends, so I’m gonna talk about something that directly affects my life and which I’m gonna ask you to take action on if you are capable of doing so:
As of today, CVS is limiting all opioid prescriptions to a 7 day supply. All of them. It doesn’t matter what they’re written for, who they’re written by (a surgeon, a PCP, a pain management professional). Flat-out across the board: 7 days.
Let me make this clear: THIS IS NOT GOING TO MEANINGFULLY ADDRESS ANY KIND OF OPIOID CRISIS IN ANY WAY. The people who are getting opioids illicitly will continue to get them. They are not getting them through legitimate prescriptions.
The ONLY thing this does is to try to make CVS look better because /they/ were not checking prescriptions properly years ago in Florida. Years ago, before all of our current nationwide “safeguards” against opioid abuse – databases that pharmacists can check, prescription limits for primary caregiving physicians, etc. – went into effect. This is part of an ass-saving publicity stunt.
And here’s the thing: while this doesn’t meaningfully address the issues surrounding opioid addiction in any way? (And I’m not even getting into the issues of how we treat addiction like a moral failing in this country, none of what follows is an indictment of addiction or addicts, only an indictment of how those of us who are not addicts are treated poorly due to the stigma of addiction.) This whole thing DOES punish non-addicted, dependent patients with legitimate prescriptions. People like me. It makes it so that I, a patient who has permanent scarring on their spinal cord, cannot get a full month’s supply of my medication from CVS. If I filled my prescriptions at CVS (which, due to their other issues, I’ve already pulled my family’s scrips), I would… what? Have to get another prescription every seven days for the rest of my life? Another doctor trip every seven days? A pile of paperwork and a trip to the pharmacy every seven days? Paying for doctor’s visits every seven days?
What if I didn’t have a husband who had a car and a job that took him out of the house he could drive to pick those up? What if I lived alone, a disabled person without the networks to get to the store repeatedly like that? What would that look like to me?
Pain literally kills people. Not just by suicide – though everyone in the chronic pain community knows at least one person who was denied pain management and took their own life as a result, and usually more than one – but pain LITERALLY ruins your body. A human being cannot be in pain all the time and live. It’s just not possible.
(Hold the ‘have you tried yoga’ and ‘there are other medications.’ For some of us, we have tried literally everything and this is the only option we have. This is the only thing that works for me.)
So tell me again: why do chronic pain patients and cancer patients need to be put through more nonsense in order to make a corporation look a little better?
Friends – especially able-bodied friends – pull your prescriptions from CVS. And if you’re on Twitter? Quote this tweet, and say this is why you are pulling your scrips. Don’t forget that Target pharmacies are CVS pharmacies now.
Go to Walgreen’s. Go to Wegman’s. Go anywhere else. Pull your scrips and tell them that you’re not going to participate in the demonizing of pain patients so CVS can look good.
“No there’s no instruments, it was a real shame. There’s a great picture in one of the books I had of Thorin and his golden harp. It would be a nice image to see him pull out something and sing a gentle song, but there’s no room for it really. There’s so much happening, there’s so much action. I don’t know, maybe at Beorn’s house — as they’re settling down for the night. It was just never part of Peter’s vision. In another version of the movie, maybe.”
Richard Armitage (The dwarves are very musical characters. Does Thorin get to pick up an instrument?) [x]
There will be a day when I see this and I will scroll past.
Today is not that day
Plus Ron is casting his curse non-verbally. That’s very difficult and it requires training and practice to successfully cast a nonverbal spell. It’s success is determined by the amount of concentration and mental discipline of the witch or wizard. But this is Ron Weasley he likely didn’t put training and practice into casting non-verbal spells, this advanced magic comes to him naturally. The only other time we see him cast a non-verbal spell is when he accidentally made it snow in the great hall, and that was only because Lavender was glaring him down after he said Hermione’s name while he was unconscious in the hospital wing. He felt crappy and his emotions were so intense he unknowingly made it snow. Here he’s trapped in a muggle cafe, with his best friend and the girl he loves. He’s probably scared, and angry but most of all protective. He wants to defeat these Death Eaters without anything happening to his team. His emotions are intense again and that allows him to cast a powerful non-verbal spell. No, not even a spell, a curse. We’ve seen Hermione cast non-verbal spells loads of times but even here she says the curse to ensure it’s potency. Ron is concentrated and disciplined enough in this moment to curse a Death Eater without any words at all.
and isn’t his “eat slugs” curse also non-verbal? because I doubt that “eat slugs” is the actual incantation for that curse and actually if I recall correctly from the book, he says “eat slugs, Malfoy” in an “eff off” sort of way but his wand isn’t even out. then a minute later when Malfoy calls Hermione a Mudblood, he takes out his wand and it backfires on him. and he’s TWELVE when he does this! it’s another moment where his emotions are running high because his friend has just been called the most awful word he’s ever heard.
Ron is a great wizard, so much of his magic is natural and intuitive and he doesn’t have to think about it the way Harry and even Hermione do. it’s just a part of him.
Death By Catchphrase 