notageek

Because I am getting SO OLD, it’s been about 10 years since I was last in a Spanish language class. I took a year of Japanese, a year of German, and a medical Spanish class, but since then my language skills have been mostly atrophying.

Then my husband wanted to go to Ecuador. So here I am, a pharmacist who supposedly speaks Spanish, in the middle of a pharmacy, and I can barely get a Ventolin inhaler. I picked up a novel that looks fairly interesting, and after several intense hours of frowning at it, I’ve gotten through the prologue. I downloaded an audio version of Tales of the Brothers Grimm last year, thinking it might be a good brush-up for my receptive language skills.

HA. Maybe if I slowed it by a factor of 4. I have to fix this. This is crap.

Someone should start a depressingly bad American-style Chinese restaurant chain, and name it “Sad Panda.”

I’m just sayin’.

I had a delightful encounter while I was stuck in the pharmacy by myself the other day.

Young gentleman and his mother came up to my counter with a new prescription. Mother realized she didn’t have the insurance card and ducked off to call the dad to ask him to fax it in. Young gentleman and I filled out his patient profile, including allergies, current medications and insurance carrier, and then his dad’s fax came in. I verified the profile information with his mom, and everything was correct. And he spoke clearly and he was patient and polite.

And he was 13. I have 21-year-olds who can’t do that. Hell, I have 35-year-old patients who can’t do that.

I’m forming a theory on culinary similarities between Southern China and the Southern US. I’ve covered the Chinese obsession with some of the pork products before, but tonight I made a very traditional Cantonese sweet-potato dessert soup. It contained sweet potatoes, jujube fruits, ginger and brown sugar.

It tasted like sweet potato pie.

Also, Cantonese-style mooncakes taste an awful lot like pecan pie. And why do we also make sweet-sauced roasted pork?

Some of the similarities are undoubtedly due to economy—mom’s parents are from some kind of Toi San hicksville—and climate. But still, it’s kind of weird. Maybe I need to eat more Southern food.

I worked slightly over half of today’s pharmacist-hours. Of the pitifully small number of scripts processed in that time, I dispensed half our Relenza and all of our Tamiflu, and I sold a bajillion boxes of surgical-style masks. Oh, and some lady freaked out because the cheapo off-brand surgical-style masks don’t have a particle micron-size filter label but the 3M ones do.

What the hell, people? We are nowhere near any of the documented swine flu cases. It is not a bad idea to have surgical-style facemasks around. It is not even a bad idea to read up on the situations in which an antiviral would be of use. But it is really, really dumb to go freaking out because somebody else already snapped up the last available box of Tamiflu in this neighbourhood. There is a supplier shortage of Tamiflu precisely because so many people are inappropriately panicking and filling scripts inappropriately when they will be of no anti-infective benefit.

YOU DON’T NEED IT, people in my patient population. And by taking it now, you are ensuring that, should this swine flu actually go pandemic, someone who needs it will go without; moreover, if you even do have flu of some kind, you are almost certainly not taking the antiviral in a manner which will reduce your symtomatic illness at all. Take your multivit, get enough sleep, eat un-crappy food and for fuck’s sake wash your hands and don’t pick at your nose. Take vitamin C, if you want. And quit listening to the “news coverage” on the “not-a-pandemic-YET!” because it will just make you stressed, paranoid, and ready to waste antivirals.