Rx Roulette: Chronic Illness Prescription Errors That Keep on Giving

Or, a morning at the home pharmacy and a decade of playing unpaid lab rat

This morning’s pharmacy run?
Four boxes.

Not shoes/cake or a haul from a fancy skincare store. All thanks to a decade of prescription errors wrapped in official packaging and polite medical shrugs.

Don’t get excited — this isn’t a Netflix cartel docuseries.
These boxes are just my life now. And they change more often than my bank balance.

In fact, they’ve changed almost every other day for the past three years — maybe longer, back when rheumatoid arthritis decided to RSVP to my body without consent. Since then, it’s been a never-ending game of musical chairs between doctors, specialists, and — unsurprisingly — professional errors.

One wrote a prescription, but the next undid it. One added, while the other contradicted.
And because there are always pharmacies, pharma reps, and private hospitals lining up like mall kiosks — why not, right?

Who questions this endless cycle anyway?
Certainly not the ones writing the prescriptions.
That job’s left to the one in the spotlight — sorry, on the examination table.

Me.

I’ve mastered the art of being ill.
They’ve perfected the fart of faulting at their convenience.

Of course, they don’t call it experimental. They’d never admit that.
But what it really is? Prescription roulette.
A spin of the wheel every week.
What will it be this time? A new steroid? Another painkiller combo?
Something “off-label” maybe, because why stick to the basics when the body is free real estate?

And what do I have to show for it?
A shelf full of medication boxes — each one carrying its own silent failures.

And every few months, like clockwork, there’s a purge.
Not of toxins. Of trust.

It’s the kind of clearance sale where nothing’s discounted, everything’s overpriced, and I’m the only one footing the bill.

Boxes of meds with expiry dates printed in shiny ink — like celebration confetti.
A reminder that time’s ticking, not just for the drugs, but for the people swallowing them.

So today, I did the ritual again.
Emptied four boxes.
A dustbin full of strips — unopened, half-used, wrongfully prescribed, and long-forgotten.

And in that moment, I thought:
Maybe I should hold a garage sale.
Call it “Slightly Used Pharma: Buy 2 Side Effects, Get 1 Free.”
Or better yet — return it all.
Mail it back to the doctors, along with the bills, the diagnostic reports, and a short note:
Since you care so much, why don’t you take these too?

But do they even realize what they’re doing?
Are they conscious of these decisions?
More importantly, do they have a conscience at all?

Because this isn’t healing.
It isn’t even hope.
It’s a business raid.
And we — the patients, the bodies, the symptoms with names —
we’re the ones getting looted,
one box, one pill, one lie at a time.