Self medication

My bestie from Grad School dropped by for a visit on her way back to Boston from Germany.  She has not been to visit for 25 years, and our last facetime was in Summer 2014. One of the hazards of international travel is that, mask or nomask, you have to sit for several hours in an aluminium incubator tube with several hundred randomers. You need a pretty robust immune system to fight off the air-borne assault of millions of spittle-drops harboring billions of viruses and we are neither of us as young and fit as we were in the the 1980s.  

Upshot is that, over the weekend, a <cof> snot and sniffle situation developed. She was flying out on Tuesday and we agreed on Bank Holiday Monday that, if they could be obtained, some anti-histamines and a cough-suppressing elixir [as R] might make the difference between getting back to Boston as scheduled and . . . not doing so. Now pharmacists, and especially pharmacy technicians [who work damned hard facing a tetchy and demanding public six days a week, but don't get paid as much as The Boss] deserve a day off. If I ruled the country, I would go back sixty years when pretty much all shops and premises were closed of a Sunday. Call me judgemental but there's something amiss if the best that people can do at the weekend is to mooch down to the Mall and buy shoddy gim-crack which nobody needs and won't bring happiness or utility once acquired. But folks do get sick over the weekend. Not mortal call-the-doctor sick, let alone opt to spend many hours in the <cof> <cof> miasma of emergency care at the nearest hospital. 

It is a known thing that in any sufficiently large community, one of the pharmacies in rotation will be open for a couple hours before lunch on Sunday. Accordingly, I fired up the Interweb to discover a) whether Enniscorthy was a sufficiently large community b) which was the designated pharmacy on that Bank Holiday Monday. Well damme if I could discover that information.  I phoned McCauleys which has been gobbling up independent pharmacies across the Sunny South East but their phone robot tellingly offered: for the pharmacy press 1; for beauty products press 2; for photography press 3; . . . for hot water bottles press 9. Drugs and band-aids may still be the core business in Irish pharmacies but the wage-bill is paid by sunscreen, mascara and deodorant. I spent a l o n g time on hold after press 1. 

I then called CareDoc on the assumption that they could / should be a clearing house for out-of-hours medical care. They offered a menu and the advice that, if it was URGENT then call 999. It wasn't urgent and I would have sat on hold for a l o n g time IF I'd been confident that CareDoc would be the key. I wasn't that confident, so after 5 minutes I hung up and called the Gardai. If I was running the show, the pharmacists would sort out who was on call and then inform the Gardai. The Guards picked up quick enough, and the answerer agreed that it would be handy to have that information available on her desk but it wasn't.

It is possible the the Irish Pharmacy Union and/or the Pharmaceutical Association of Ireland, has a policy or standard operating procedure for ensuring minimal access to pharmacy products over the weekend but I haven't been able to figure it out.  I turned instead to La Torbellina de Tenerife our highly effective, highly networked neighbour across the valley. Her response? "Enniscorthy is rubbish. I'm much better connected in New Ross. Indeed, I am even at this moment on my way to the next village over and I'll pick you what you need in Ross. Wait, I have antihistaminics here in the house, I'll drop them up before I go".  So we sorted our non-urgent but important care issues in a timely fashion. But only because we have an accomplished magician in our midst.

The IPU and PAI have a case to answer and a policy to roll out.