Pharmacisting: For the Glory of Federally Sanctioned Drug Dealing

So I’ve been working in a pharmacy for about 5 years. I just sort of fell into my first pharmacy job. To be honest an old man pharmacist with a gold chain and unruly chest hair persuaded me to join the business. I was looking for a job sophomore year of college and I happened to walk into an Eckerd that happened to be looking to hire someone for the pharmacy and the managing sixty-year-old male pharmacist wearing the wranglers and a shirt that should have been closed one button more toward the top thought I would be fine filling medicine for the sick and the old even though I knew absolutely nothing at all about filling medications. But in spite of my lack of knowledge and Pharmacist Hairy Chest’s lack of good judgment, I didn’t kill anyone those first few months (as far as I know). Eventually, I did catch on and I passed some test to get my certification from whatever board certifies these kinds of things and now I kick ass at prescription filling. Seriously. I like to consider myself the Chuck Norris of Pharmacy Teching. Ha. No. Really.

Being a Certified Pharmacy Technician or Jessica Kelly, CPhT (my official title) has been a good experience. However, you don’t need a freakin’ BA to fill people’s medications and I happen to have one. In psychology. So obviously there’s not much of a connection between my job and those four years I spent in higher education. And so the time has come to move on from teching into the world of pharmacisting… pharmacistology? Whatever. I’m going there.

I devised this little plan when I was in that sweet car o’ mine driving from Idaho to Texas in a day. A solid twenty-four and a half quality hours with me (and my O magazine, Dave Eggers book, I-pod nano, Marlboro Lights, Starbucks coffee, Adderall, etc). But during that time I started thinking about the future and stuff. I hadn’t thought a whole lot about my next step professionally in about 4 months. It was on my list of things to do while I was in California, I just didn’t get around to doing it what with all the escapism and loving nature. So I’m somewhere in Oklahoma and I’m thinking that if I went back to school within the next year or so and went full time for like 3 or 4 years, I could be a pharmacist by the time I’m thirty. That means that I would have my doctorate in pharmacology and I could get a job anywhere I wanted in the US making pretty decent money. Then I thought about my alternative, which was being thirty and still being a pharmacy tech or something like it and not making half the money I could and pretty much wasting a 4-year degree. And I didn’t like the alternative.

So I picked pharmacy school. Now all I really need to do is decide when I want to start and get going.

Oh, and I need to take two semesters of organic chemistry before I can even apply.

Bollocks.