First Pharmacy Experience

I feel that my first pharmacy experience has been a good one here in Oregon. We feel lucky to have been able to stay with my folks. Although I have been studying this past year for pharmacy, I have to admit, that I have never really worked in a pharmacy before. The closest thing I had to working in a pharmacy was shadowing at Wal-mart before I got into Midwestern. I made sure to let my preceptor know of my inexperience and he made sure to let me know that I was not coming in on Monday (which is when I should have started), but that maybe I should come in on Tuesday, which was actually real thoughtful of him, because if I did come in on Monday I have a feeling they would have walked me to the back of the pharmacy, sat me down on a stool, make me fold my arms, and tell me not to move for the next ten hours no matter what I hear at the front. I soon found out that Mondays are the busiest days at a pharmacy. I was really lucky with the staff at the pharmacy, and learned alot. Here is a small list of things that I learned about pharmacy...

1) If I work in a retail pharmacy, I will make sure that they organize the medication by active ingredient or generic rather than by Brand Name, which I may mention is the most assanine thing I have ever heard of. I spent many lonely and confused hours walking around the pharmacy with a bottle of a generic medication knowing what it should be under then when a tear begins to form in the corner of my eye and anger monkeys are seering my brain with hot branding irons that spell "stupid" does the pharmacist tell me that it is actually under a completely different brand name.

2) All those things that we learned in the first year of pharmacy school, that for some reason were labeled "short term memory," such as what are common symptoms of thrombocytopenia or what is the mechanism of action of Heparin and how does that affect the clotting pathway? These sort of things should have really been labeled "long term memory."

3) If you are going to own your own pharmacy, then you have to have a "nitch." This could be that you're the only pharmacy for 50 miles in each direction. Or it could be that you are the only compounding pharmacy in the city. Or if you are in Vale Oregon, then this "nitch" would be that you are the only pharmacy that is also a Gun Store. So while you come buy ammo, guns, targets, elk piss, or whatnot, you can also pick up your medication, and get advice about both hunting in the mountains near by and what to do if you have an allergic reaction to a plant that you wiped your butt with.

4) When being introduced to a patient and the pharmacists says this is our "bright new intern" then the pharmacist asks you a question that you learned the first year but was labeled "short term memory" by accident, don't pretend that you didn't hear him because you were too interested in following a fly. This is when you say, "I do not know the answer, we have not yet gone over that subject matter."