Prescriptions

I’ve worked in a pharmacy for over 4 years, and I have some horrible stories I could tell but there was one wonderful story that has stuck with me.
It was around Christmas season and a young woman came in with her son, who was 2 years old.
He had just gotten out of the hospital and his mother had 5 prescriptions for him and after imputing all of his information I had to inform her that his insurance was no longer active.
She had no idea, considering his father was the one who was supposed to have insurance on the boy and they are no longer together, so they didn’t speak often.
She started frantically calling around to everyone she knew, and after trying for about an hour she left to go charge her phone and “call everyone she knew that might help her.”
While she was gone I tried everything possible to get her son’s prescriptions to the lowest amount possible, and after all of my hard work I got them from $645 to $260 dollars, still quite a lot by any means.
She called back later in the day to see how low I could get them so that she knew exactly how much she’d need to borrow, and after talking with her on the phone I had another patient walk up. I continued talking about the price and then we started discussing maybe her only getting two of them instead of all 5, she then told me she’d would be back up later to get the two.
After I had hung up, the patient I had waiting asked me if the person I was talking to on the phone couldn’t afford their medicine, and I just said yes.
And with no hesitation, she said “can you let me pay for them?”
I was stunned. I told her the prescriptions were over 200 dollars and she said “that’s fine.”
I took her to the register rang up the prescription and said “what would you like me to tell her?”
and she said “tell her Merry Christmas, and to pay it forward.”
I immediately called the patient who didn’t answer her phone.
About 3 hours later right before my shift ended she came in, and walked to the register and started thanking me for getting the prescriptions to a lower price.
and I had the pleasure of looking into the woman’s eyes and saying “they have already been paid for, I was told to tell you Marry Christmas and to pay it forward"
And she immediately broke down into tears.

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