Nil Desperandum Auspice Deo

We survived another week, hurrah and huzzah. I was going to leave off blogging for a while but seeing as I still have the privilege of going to work everyday, I thought it might be useful to give you a snapshot of what is happening on what is now seriously called the frontline without eliciting a smirk from anyone. How bizarre is that? The panic-buying seems to be subsiding, and the deliveries are coming into supermarkets now. Working in a pharmacy is now more like what we actually trained for– clinical checks to make sure your GP isn’t about to kill you off (fairly rare, you’ll be glad to know), dispensing and checking medication, helping the general public, counselling, giving advice, sorting out drug alerts (you don’t want to know), convincing the public to calm the hell down, finding an alternative drug for the GP to prescribe in the face of the gazillion drugs that have been in short supply for the last year, and all this with a smile on our faces (more or less…….) The workload is bonkers – our volume of prescriptions went up 50% in one week while the number of self-isolating colleagues also went up 50% in that same week for a lot of pharmacies. You have no idea how insanely busy it is behind the scenes.

People are slowly beginning to adjust to the fact that we aren’t there to give advice about which shampoo will make your hair look younger (seriously?), or which particular shade of foundation suits you best and when will it come back into stock (never, it was being made in a factory in Wuhan). And no, I am not going to leave off checking the blister pack of medicines that is going out to Mr Bloggs who has just arrived home after surviving cardiac arrest to look at the rash you’ve had for twenty minutes which may or may not be due to your imaginary food allergies. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with the general public who are mostly just doing their best to adjust to the crazy times we live in. I ❤️ U, Human Race. It’s a pleasure to go out and see you everyday. The number of people helping out a neighbour/offering to help with medicine deliveries/stoically putting up with shortages and delays is amazing. Never mind clapping the NHS, the majority should be clapping for themselves. The hospitals are no-go zones; ghost towns waiting for a deluge of patients which I am happy to report is not happening in most places, GPs are only letting in one patient at a time, none of us can guarantee we will be alive from one day to the next, but we are all still here to tell the tale, thank God, and to tell jokes. Laughter is an excellent booster of the immune system, and ‘as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he’. It’s actually a relief to write a blog to cheer people up without trying to sell them anything; not that I ever tried the hard-selling, bad businesswoman that I am 🙂

In that spirit, I’m sharing my favourite CV jokes with you. AlaraApothecary: we make your day better. I hope you and yours are in excellent health. For the Christians out there, remember Ps 46: God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble. For everyone else, I hope whatever you rely on for spiritual sustenance does what it says on the tin. Have a wonderful week.