Last winter, I was in CVS getting my prescription refilled when I saw a sign about flu shots. I’d been putting mine off for weeks because I couldn’t get an appointment with my doctor until after the holidays. So I asked the pharmacist if I could just get it done right there. She said sure,…
Okay, let’s talk about something that’s probably driving you a little crazy – all those pill bottles lined up on your counter. Every time you go to the doctor, it seems like they add another one to the collection. Am I right? You’re standing there in the morning trying to remember if you already took…
Last October, I watched a grown man argue with Denise, our pharmacy’s head pharmacist, for twenty minutes about how the flu shot gave his cousin’s neighbor autism. Denise, who has the patience of a saint and three decades of experience, just nodded and said, “Sir, the flu shot doesn’t have that power. But the flu…
My mom used to go to this little pharmacy on Main Street where the pharmacist knew everyone’s name and what they were taking. I thought it was old-fashioned and kind of pointless – why not just go to CVS where it’s faster and probably cheaper? Then I started taking a bunch of medications myself and…
Last month, Eleanor walked into my pharmacy looking confused and frustrated. She’d just been discharged from Meridian with five new prescriptions, minimal explanation, and that all-too-familiar feeling of being rushed through an overwhelmed healthcare system. “My doctor had seven minutes with me,” she sighed, sliding her prescriptions across the counter. “Seven minutes to explain five…
The morning I found my mother’s blood pressure medication dissolved in her coffee was the wake-up call we both needed. “I hate swallowing pills,” she confessed, stirring the murky mixture. “So I’ve been crushing them up for months now.” My heart sank—some medications should never be crushed, including the time-release one now ruined in her…
The morning rush at my Middlesex County pharmacy always brings a parade of familiar faces—the construction worker grabbing antihistamines before heading to a job site, the teacher picking up her asthma inhaler, the commuter refilling blood pressure meds before catching the train to Manhattan. After twenty years behind this counter, I’ve come to recognize the…
The thick envelope arrived in Margaret’s mailbox last October—that familiar annual package of Medicare information that somehow seems to grow heavier each year. As she spread the contents across her kitchen table in her Montclair home, the feeling of overwhelm was immediate. Plan changes, new premium rates, formulary adjustments—the healthcare equivalent of reading another language.…
The morning routine at Shirley’s Middletown ranch house has evolved into something of a ritual. Coffee brews while she arranges seven translucent orange bottles on her kitchen counter, the early light catching each plastic container like small amber lanterns. “This one’s for my heart,” she says, tapping the tallest bottle. “These two are for blood…
That familiar tickle in your throat has returned, along with the sneezing fits that interrupt your morning coffee on the porch. Yes, it’s allergy season again in Howell—that time when our picturesque Michigan town transforms into a beautiful but sneeze-inducing landscape for many of us. As someone who’s spent years behind the pharmacy counter watching…