Rotations rotations rotations

Decided it was time for another life update for my faithful readers.
Mostly just going to discuss my pharmacy life for now... I hope to get another post up soon about moving back to Westerville and other general life updates.


So I have finished my first rotation and am a week and a half through my second one. The first was the month of June spent at the Apothecary Shop, a specialty/compounding pharmacy down in the Arena District.

High lights- Laid back atmosphere, they compounded some cool things like specialty capsules, lozenges, creams/ointments/gels, and had a clean room for injectables (including intraocular injections - stick a needle in your eye?), nice people to work with and easy hours. Also, being a specialty pharmacy, their clientele was way different from my usual; sexual health (including lots of transgenders), pain management (the *nice* addicts, not the crazy ones), HIV/AIDS patients, veterinary stuff (I made tablets using "Grilled Tuna" flavoring oils), and so on.

Low points- They didn't have much organized for me to do. I ended up mostly being free production labor for them and I didn't learn anything new after the first week there. It got really boring/tedious/frustrating because it ended up being a waste of my time and I think they used me more as free help than actually focusing on the fact that I was a student with an honest interest in their work.

Outcome- It was interesting for a little bit but ultimately disheartening. I can cross off compounding-pharmacist as a career path because the pharmacist himself is never involved with the actual production of the cool dosage forms besides quality control and verification; the production aspect was the only interesting thing to me. I definitely got some new experiences: custom-making cherry steroid lozenges for a transgender patients (was it James or Jamie, now, sir/maam?), working for a small independent as opposed to my current mega corporation, and working in a lower volume store.

Currently I am at Cardinal Health for the rest of August. It is kind of a combined rotation to expose me to both the corporate side of running a pharmacy business and also to introduce me to nuclear pharmacy.
Unfortunately/fortunately, I am starting to fall desperately in love with nuclear pharmacy. Everything they do is just so much cooler, and it is a field that actually applies some of the 5 years of science stuffed down my throat. There is something massively appealing to me about this practice: understanding of nuclear physics and decay, radiation and how to use it in diagnostics/therapy and shielding/reducing exposure, the pharmacokinetics and biochemistry (how the drug is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and eliminated from the body and the tissues it tends to perfuse more readily), and just the sheer badass factor.
My preceptor for the month is in the Quality and Regulatory department at the corporate office, so it has been interesting to hear from her all the crazy things that can go wrong and also to understand the reasoning behind the production process/safety issues. She is also the most nice/bubbly/energetic person in the world with a true passion for teaching anybody interested in becoming a "Nuke", as she calls it. So far I've got to play (and by play, I mean watch somebody else work on something while being terrified I was going to turn into a mutant from radiation) with a particle accelerator/cyclotron where they create radioactive materials, using the robot arms to manipulate RAM (radioactive materials) in the "Hot box"- which is basically a sterile vault encased in 3 feet of lead shielding, sit in on the error/safety correction team's meetings, work on supply chain issues (there are only 3 nuclear reactors in the world qualified to create the specific nuclear material needed for medical use, and right now 2 of them are off-line, so it's been interesting to see how they stretch out the material they can get their hands on), and also get to see a big overall picture of corporate life by meeting "all the paper pushers in this massive bureaucracy." I get to meet people in charge of the different operations teams here at Cardinal, including the head marketing director, operations director, and the president of the entire nuclear pharmacy division which amounts to about 70 pharmacy sites and 30 cyclotron sites across the country (wearing a suit to that meeting!)

Anyways, I be ramblin'.
Highlights- NEAT! (as mentioned above), no dealing with snobby customers/ruthless insurance companies, more interaction with healthcare professionals like radiologists, nuclear medicine technologists, PET technicians, chemical engineers/chemists, and most satisfying so far- utilization of Mr. expensively-educated-brain in my head.

Low points- Awful, awful hours for your average nuclear pharmacist (typically something like 3am-11am, plus being on call), no openings (at least at Cardinal's sites) in the Columbus area, and I didn't expect to like it SO much and therefore this rotation is making me really question the official "5 year plan" I had figured out in my head for going down the CVS career path.

Outcome- I don't know yet. I have another 2 weeks here and then I will start a new rotation of more practical/hands on work at the OSU nuclear pharmacy next month. I am waiting to see if my infatuation with nuclear pharmacy waxes or wanes as I get into the practical, everyday work of it over the next 6 weeks, and then I will have to seriously analyze where I'm going with my life. Stress. I am extremely happy that I bent over backwards to get these two nuclear pharmacy rotations because I have finally found a field that I may very well have fallen in love with, but it's a much messier career path. If I turn down the CVS offer (which I have to reply to by November), I have no guarantee of a job at all, and if I do get a nuke position it probably won't be local due to the low turnover rate, and I really really don't want to move away from my beloved Columbus. The hours are a real challenge to normal life functions as well. Lots to consider...