Thank you anon. I've been able to remember them all fairly easily because I took four years of Latin in college. I didn't want to post that. When I wrote it out, it seems sort of obnoxious, and the last thing I need to be is more obnoxious, so I backspaced it out. Sig origins are Latin. Their functions are codes. So I went with the function explanation.
I really didn't understand English until I understood Latin. I think it has much more capacity for clear expression. It's also full of declensions and other suffixes that bugged me and still bug me. But now that I'm learning medical terms, the Latin is serving me extremely well and giving me a bit of an edge over my training partners who will be my competition come Aug 1.
Latin is a dead language but it is still used in some situations, like this one, so it's not quite buried. Pharmacists have to know all the sigs. By heart. If a pharmacist fucks up a prescription by misreading a hard copy, he or she is looking at a lawsuit. STAT. We can not put the wrong instructions on prescriptions. There is no room for mistakes ever. I'm sure I'll get dressed down once or twice for fucking up. I'm bracing for it, and studying against it. The wrong instructions can cause serious injury, and death. The training I am getting has a block on that very thing every day. They try to slip wrong instructions by us all the time to see if we catch them.
Also, being at least twice the age of everyone else in the program, I've taken a lot of the drugs we are memorizing. Not that I tell anyone that. But I smile secretly when my lab partner asks me "How did you learn all those in one night?" If you put together all the drugs my mom has been on over the years, all the drugs I have tried, all the drugs my husband (who has several serious health problems) takes, my daughter in law's diabetes, my oldest grandson's cerebral palsy and seizures, I already have a distinct advantage over my 20 year old trainees. I used to take my mom's valium for PMS in 1974. She's been on everything. She's on Methadone now. I worry she won't live out the rest of this year.
Sorry. rambling thoughts run through my fingers to the keys. Point being I'm trying to stay positive and tell myself that this is going to work and I'm going to get a job and start a new career, even though other people my age are retiring. I have passed all my tests so far, including my drug test. (I miss herb really bad.)
The math is killing me. I have math anxiety and not taking benzos, it is worse. I don't like to multiply fractions, divide decimals, or translate ml to teaspoons. But I'm grown folk. I'll suck it up and do it, will to power.