Local View: Odyssey of Ryll’s pills

On Feb. 18, I refilled a prescription with the nearby Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center pharmacy. At my standing request it was mailed; it went out early the next day.

When it didn’t arrive after nearly a week, I called the pharmacy. A technician checked the tracking data and reported that the U.S. Postal Service had shipped the order from Portland to California.

Sacramento, specifically.

Then to Portland.

Then back to Sacramento.

Then back to Portland.

Then back to Sacramento.

The idiotic odyssey of Ryll’s pills has made my package a poster child – or maybe a postage child – for the mishandling of the USPS by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Consumers around the country have inundated lawmakers with complaints about delayed mail and the disruption it has caused. But while millions of letters and packages have apparently been stalled for days or even weeks, my prescription had mostly been moving.

And moving.

And moving.

For days the USPS hauled it up and down Interstate 5, also checking in at Eugene, Ore., several times before reaching Sacramento and heading north again with what seemed like no direction home. Between Feb. 19 and March 1, the prescription, which apparently went via the USPS Scenic Route, racked up 24 tracking entries. (One, indicating that it left Sacramento two minutes after arriving, appeared on the tracking data for a time and then disappeared. In its place an entry showed it left, northbound, precisely 12 hours after arriving.)

For years, letters and packages mailed in Clark County have been shipped across the Columbia River to Portland and then back for delivery. I, like other postal patrons, have grown accustomed to overnight service, or maybe a day longer. But my package, in its seemingly unbreakable infinite loop of nondelivery, was something else.

Tracking data show the package was accepted at Portland the night of Feb. 19 and headed to Eugene, Ore., early the next morning. It was there a couple hours and hustled off to Sacramento, arriving 10 hours later. It sat there for nearly three days but rolled north to Eugene during another 10-hour run. It arrived in Portland the evening of Feb. 23 and was there three hours before heading the wrong way again, to Eugene, Ore. It apparently didn’t linger – although there is no tracking data for departure time – before setting out for Sacramento again. Eleven hours later, it reached Sacramento. Apparently having had enough of its earlier long layover, the package was on the move only 45 minutes later, bound, again, for Eugene, Ore. Then, again, Portland.

Then, again, after 11 hours and apparently skipping Eugene, Ore., the truck carrying the orphaned package tied up at Sacramento one last time on Feb. 26. After final visits to Eugene, Ore., and Portland, the shipment miraculously made its way across the river to Vancouver and, on the afternoon of March 1, onto my front porch.

The final tally: Four visits to Portland, five to Eugene, three to Sacramento.

I began having prescriptions mailed to me months ago for convenience. In the pandemic era, having them mailed has been one way of limiting contact. When I first called the pharmacy it immediately offered to fill at least part of the prescription on an emergency basis, but I said it wasn’t necessary, even though I had run out, because the blood pressure pills are such a low dose.

On March 1, I contacted the pharmacy again, to have an employee confirm that, yes, the package I received, with its correct, computer-printed mailing and return addresses, and properly attached USPS tracking number sticker, was the one they sent in mid-February. The employee said there have been occasional reports of prescriptions misdirected by the USPS, but nothing quite as spectacular as three trips to California: “I think that’s a first.”

The universal response of those who hear this tale is to burst out laughing. “Why don’t you drive to the California-Oregon border and intercept the truck?” was one helpful suggestion. At the same time, many expressed irritation at the widespread reports of USPS service corrosion.

I will never know why my package bounced for weeks like a pingpong ball between two far-flung cities. But these points are inescapable, judging from those two dozen tracking entries: Between Feb. 19 and March 1, that little piece of mail traveled the equivalent of driving from Portland to New York City, and back to Cincinnati. My house is 2 miles from Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center.