Let's see if I have this right:

1) You accepted a job which requires minimal travel -- meaning, minimal time spent traveling, not traveling within a minimal radius. Travel is required of you. It is a function of your job. If I refuse to do a function of my job, I will probably be fired, too, and be fired for cause, so I couldn't collect unemployment.

2) You took two heavy anti-anxiety pills, plus an anti-seizure medication, PLUS two servings of alcohol which are expressly contraindicated on at least one of those medications (and contrary to that one poster who said that alcohol warnings don't mean anything -- actually the reason they're on most meds is that alcohol *does* adversely interact with most medications).

3) You woke up in handcuffs. That doesn't mean you "immediately fell asleep". It means you immediately *blacked out*. People get up to all kinds of things while they are in a blackout. I know one person who "woke up" in a karaoke bar in the middle of singing "House of the Rising Sun".

Based on 2 and 3, I'm going to wager that you caused an incredible amount of trouble while you were blacked out. People aren't escorted from planes in cuffs unless they're totally out of control. You said yourself that you got your hands out of the cuffs *twice* -- meaning you were totally uncooperative. Your own highly-sympathetic legal team has told you that you have no case. That means the evidence is overwhelmingly against you.

Based on 1, you also don't have any case against your boss. Unless you signed a contract that explicitly stated *plane* travel would never be a part of your job, you can't complain that s/he lied to you about never having to be on a plane. S/he didn't.

I can't believe the amount of sympathy this letter has generated. To all those letter writers saying that she's been mistreated: what do you think your reaction would have been had you been the passenger sitting next to her on that plane?

they all have the label, "unless your doctor tells you otherwise, do not drink alcohol while taking this medication". Pretty indiscriminate, and meaning - they haven't looked at what this drug even is, just ask the doctor.

Right, because your own doctor will know what levels of meds you're on and your ETOH intake (1 drink a day? 5?), and can advise you on a personal level whether alcohol consumption is acceptable for you as an individual patient, or not. Hence the warning: you probably shouldn't drink with this medication, but your doctor knows your body chemistry better than we do, so s/he might say its OK in your case.

And so I ask my doctors - really the pharmacy doctor

The "pharmacy doctor" is a pharmacist, not a doctor. They have no access to your medical history, and depending on your purchasing habits, any of the other medications you might be on.

I'll say that again: pharmacists are not DOCTORS. They did not go to medical school, they do not have a medical degree, and they definitely don't have your medical history at their fingertips. They do have your *medication* history -- only if you have always purchased your meds through their pharmacy. They can advise you on generalities -- take this one with food, take that one on empty stomach, don't mix these two medications, don't drink while taking this one, etc.

They absolutely can't advise you on how your body will interact with any given medication. They don't know how you react to alcohol, for example, so to be on the safe side they'll say "don't drink -- or ask your doctor if s/he thinks its OK for you." That is information your DOCTOR has about you: prior lab results, prior medical events, family history, social history. Pharmacists have none of that, and should not be advising you on your medication intake beyond what is expressly indicated in the medication literature itself.

Hence, they are pharmacy DOCTORS. They ask you what other medications you're taking, you tell them. And its because they just say this stuff to be on the safe side, that people decide the warnings aren't really based on the drug being actually known to have alcohol interactions, and that they know their bodies and how it reacts to alcohol better.

Oh Jesus Christ. They're only advising you about this med with respect to OTHER MEDS. You just said it yourself. All they're looking for are drug-drug interactions, not drug-patient interactions. What else do they ask you? Do they also take a full medical history from you? Do they have access to any of your chart information? Do they know anything about you other than the meds you tell them you're on? Do they ask about OTC medication as well?

You bet your ass they're saying it to be on the safe side, because alcohol interacts with most drugs -- either by enhancing the drug's effects or by preventing you from metabolizing it properly, which can lead to total liver failure and death in a matter of hours (happened to someone my dad knew -- took a painkiller after a night of drinking on Friday and was dead by Sunday afternoon).

The sheer number of alcohol contraindications should be an indicator that it's quite serious, not that it doesn't mean anything at all. There are a lot of stop lights on my way to work; should I start ignoring them too? I mean after all, they're on a timer system, and don't really know that there's any traffic coming from the other side, right?