As I age, I realize that more and more of my life is going to be taken up by consuming various drugs. Right now, I’m lucky (sorta) to just have to worry about two kinds of dope, but as it happens I ran out of both last week only to have the internet save the day.
One of the drugs is prescribed, so I sent a note to my doctor through the clinic’s online message service. Right away, he wrote back and said he’d renewed the script and sent it to an online pharmacy I use. (A legitimate one! Recommended by my insurer!) Within a few hours, I received an automated call from that pharmacy informing me that they had received the renewal prescription and were sending out my usual 90-day supply of the meds. It arrived the next day. Fantastically easy, requiring only 30 seconds of work online and a $14 charge to my checking account.
The other medicine is a eye ointment which I take to prevent “corneal edema” – scratched corneas, a malady to which I’m unfortunately susceptible. This stuff is ridiculously expensive – about $20 for an eighth-ounce of the generic stuff. For no good reason, I’d never before thought to look online for it, but this time I did, using Amazon’s iPad app while I stood in the hallway supervising the girls’ bath. I found the exact brand I’d been buying in town, noted the huge discount, hit “1-click order” and had five tubes in my hands two days later for the price I’d have paid to get two downtown.
I kinda hate to be spending my money online when it could go to local merchants, but in these cases at least, the convenience and savings were too great to ignore.