I live in the U.S., first off.
I was prescribed a narcotic following a minor surgery. I’m not going to say what kind of surgery that was and please don’t ask. I’ll just go ahead and say that the prescription was for hydrocodone/acetaminophen 5-35. I’m worried about having been prescribed this because I know there’s a state-wide electronic system used to monitor all prescriptions—accessible by all doctors, pharmacies, etc. anywhere else in my state—and I know that system is used to flag people for prescription drug abuse. I also know that medications like this are highly frowned upon by the healthcare system itself and even more so by the authorities. I assume it’s entirely possible that I look suspicious according to that system now.
I’ve only taken a three pills so far, out of ten total. If I take the other seven back to the pharmacy to have them destroyed, they’ll make a record of that, I would imagine.
What I mean is that I could just stop taking them now but never tell anyone that, and anyone looking at my medical history in the future would see that I picked up ten pills from the pharmacy, and that’s all they would see, and so I took the entire script as far as they know; whereas if I take the other seven back, and they make another entry in their records about that, that’s in effect like plus ten and then minus seven, and that way I would theoretically have three pills counted against my medical history instead of ten; right?
I could be way overanalyzing this, but frankly, I’m already terrified to take another one anyway. I honestly don’t like how they make me feel, which is good, but it would be just my luck that I’d take one more pill and start liking it immediately. I know what happens to people who end up liking this stuff, and how easy it is to end up liking it; I’ve seen it. It’s also that I’m still relatively young, and my health’s already bad enough at this point as it is, that I already know they’ll eventually put me in the ground with at least one major surgery, and I don’t want to have to get through that with ibuprofen because I’ve already blown it.
You’re not overanalyzing it. You’re Wayyyyy overanalyzing it to a detrimental degree.
Even if you did take them back, and the pharmacy made a log of it, it would just be in their internal pharmacy ‘drugs to destroy’ log and wouldn’t be sent to the state or anywhere else to update your records.
All they see is that you were prescribed a very small amount of a low dose pain medication once after a surgery and you picked it up. Something thousands of people do every single day.
It’s not that important. You’re not going to be red-flagged because your doctor/surgeon wrote a prescription and you picked it up.
You only get flagged as a drug seeker for drug-seeking behavior. That does not include picking up a small prescription for a few pain meds a doctor wrote for you after minor surgery. If it did, anyone who’s ever had a root canal or tooth pulled would be flagged and the system would be useless.
Exactly. My wife and I take a mix of Sudafed & another medicine when we have bad colds. The active ingredient for them is pseudoephedrine which can be used to make meth, so our state requires ID and limits how much you can purchase a month. On more than one occasion we’ve purchased the maximum we could in order to stock up before cold & flu season. Never had any issues doing so.