Just had the most infuriating night of work.

The other tech and the pharmacist are both completely incapable of actually listening to me. At all times, but especially times when anything is confusing, because those times require more listening, while also raising stress to levels that impede it.

A confusing thing happened with a patient. And of course no listening happened at all.

Tech was angry, because she wasn’t listening to me and couldn’t absorb anything except that I was saying things that she couldn’t easily reconcile with her memory of events. (This of course set off an anger feedback loop– because more anger led to even less listening, which blocked her from absorbing my explanation that could have helped her reconcile the events, and pretty soon she was outright accusing me of telling lies that I could not have had any possible earthly reason to want to tell.)

Pharmacist is a very calm and peaceful guy, whose worldview is probably influenced by frequent exposure to Tech, meaning that his approach is pretty much always “defuse fighting and discourage people from blaming each other.” Which is a worthy goal– but unfortunately, to get there, he always starts from a deeply entrenched assumption that everyone is always TRYING to blame someone, or deflect blame off themselves, or both.

Making it impossible to communicate anything to him that is NOT about blame… because he has already decided that’s what you’re talking about, and nothing you actually say can stop him from hearing what he’s decided he’s going to hear.

So I spent some miserably futile time trying to convey some simple pieces of information about the timeline of what I had seen happening with this patient’s prescriptions– and getting answered with utter uselessness. From one side, nothing but placid reassurances that no one was going to try and blame me. And from the other side just a barrage of rabid accusations of lying.

Which, besides contradicting each other, were both absolutely nothing like what I actually wanted… which would have been just some simple acknowledgement that someone heard and would remember what I said about the things that’d happened to the patient’s prescriptions.

Yknow, just in case that information was needed, in the event that these two people’s combined lunacy might result in the patient’s prescriptions temporarily vanishing from the observable universe (i.e. spending some time in places so batshit random that no person in this universe would ever think of trying to observe them there).

It got so bad that I wrote an email, sent it to pharmacist and told him it was there in case he needed the information – and still couldn’t get even a hint of a suggestion from him that he would ever consider reading this email or showing it to anyone else. Only more placid reassurances that there would be no need to, because as long as the patient got was she wanted there wasn’t going to be any problem.

And still an absolute refusal to acknowledge my point, which was that this information could be necessary in order for the patient to get what she wanted– since it explained why we were literally doing the opposite of what the patient asked us to do (i.e. shipping the meds to her house, on Pharmacist’s orders, instead of transferring the prescriptions to her local pharmacy where the patient had said she wanted to get them).

No, this wasn’t considered useful information. Because from Tech’s perspective, the patient could never have asked for that, I was obviously lying (for some batshit reason she refused to try and explain). And from Pharmacist’s perspective it didn’t matter if the patient had asked for it or not, because shipping it to her home was clearly the better option.

And yes, it’s entirely possible that this WAS the best choice in order to ensure the patient received the meds! I know about transfers to local pharmacies, I know they often don’t work! BUT, I also know that when a person says “why did you do X when I asked you to do Y?” you are only going to compound the problem if you answer “No, you never said to do Y! We have no record of that!”

You have to have a fucking record of it! Because if you don’t, the first fallout is gonna be a bunch of assumptions like, “oh no, this is the very first we ever heard that the patient wanted Y!” and then “did we even actually do X? Maybe you’re wrong and we did that for a different patient!” or “damnit, no we did, we fucked up and now we have to undo the X that we did!” and hours are gonna be wasted on looking into dead ends that would have been explained by someone just reading my goddamn email.

Ugh.