Arnold Zwicky's Blog

My days are spinning out of control, with more crises to attend to and less available time to do much more than race around with my hair on fire. Out of all this, just one thing, the 5 mg prednisone refill through CVS Caremark mail delivery. Reported on in my 6/3 posting “Today’s catch-22”, about this prescription refill gone awry for weeks (after, apparently, being sent for pickup at a local CVS pharmacy), a sad story that ended with the following exchange between someone I believed to be an actual human agent or representative of CVS Caremark, who went on:

to present me with an apology and the news that my prednisone would go out to me this very afternoon. Cautiously, I explained that I was disabled and housebound (she already had my birthdate, so she knew I was really old) and needed reassurance that it was going out in the mail. To my home address.

“Oh yes, sir. To your home address. It should take a few days.”

That was 6/3. It is now 6/12, 9 days later, and today’s mail has come, with a new issue of the New Yorker in it, but no prednisone. We’re now down to composing a 5 mg dosage from smaller-dose pills that we have left over from earlier prescriptions. Crisis time is on the horizon.

I am now seized with alarm, with a feeling of dread that this refill, like the previous one, is in the wind, not in the mail. Let me explain.

What normally happens in filling a prescription through CVS Caremark is that I submit a request on-line, then get an e-mail confirming the order, followed by further information e-mails as the order is processed, eventually with a notice that it’s gone out in the mail, along with a way to track the order.

None of that happened with the refill that I reported on in my earlier posting. I got not a single e-mail notification. I see now that that should have alerted me to the possibility that the entire story about the earlier prescription having gone awry might have been an utter fabrication by the AI bots that CVS Caremark is now probably using to service its customers. Well, it’s an idea.

A deeply disturbing idea. If so, the current order is probably equally fictitious, and the 5 mg prednisone tablets will never come.

And indeed, once again, I have gotten not a single e-mail notification about the progress of the order that was supposed to have gone out in the mail on 6/3 (see above).

I would very much like my suspicions about the current order to turn out to be unfounded; it could be that the USPS is just very slow. It could be that the prednisone isn’t coming from a warehouse in Connecticut, but from one in China, and then who knows how long it might take to get to California. So for the moment it’s just wait and see. And fret about schemes to taper the prednisone down to zero (there are good reasons why we haven’t been doing that).

There’s a whole circus of stuff like this going on in my life right now. At the moment I’m in dread, not despair. (Yes, I am fully aware of national and world affairs, but I still have to cope with daily life.)

This entry was posted on June 12, 2025 at 5:41 pm and is filed under AI, My life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.