There is a significant part of me that must like life made difficult.
My medication is running low.
I realise that sentence is more like an extract from a low budget horror film script in which the psycho is giving the first intimation that something truly gruesome is about to happen. It is also a simple indication that my little plastic daily boxes are not being filled with the requisite number of ill tasting pastilles.
After my experience of terminal bureaucracy mixed with colourful ineptitude which characterised my first dealings (and second, third, fourth and fifth dealings) with the medical services in my adopted country, I had thought that my vicissitudes had settled down into bearable irritation.
Not so.
In Catalonia when you get a regular prescription they give you two: one for the immediate needs and a second dated a month in the future.
My last (and first) brush with the Catalan pharmacists was when they gave me the wrong medication and then charged me extra when they changed it! But that is old history and has been quite forgotten. Never brought to mind. What gross medical incompetence? Impossible!
Since that first traumatic brush I have complicated matters by not using the second prescription as I had enough medication from Britain which, augmented with the first prescription’s worth of stuff was enough until the present day. So I thought that I would now use the second prescription which was dated the tenth of November. Wrong!
Prescriptions last for ten days after the written date. As I was informed by the triumphantly smug lady pharmacist. I could, at once, see that my usual method of ping ponging between various medical locations was going to proceed in enervating frustration as per bloody usual. With perhaps a visit to Gavá thrown in for good measure. It always seems to make sense to my medical practice anyway.
My return to the doctors’ was to find that the place where I get the new prescriptions had closed five minutes earlier. Four hours later armed with new prescriptions I was forty-five minutes too early for the early evening opening of the chemist. Never mind, I told myself with what can only be defined as insanely self deluding optimism, I will get it done in the large shopping centre in Sant Boi. No pharmacy. Not even for ready money.
But if you think that this story demonstrates how difficult it is to get something simple like a prescription filled, try finding an A5 envelope. Or better still: don’t. Just have a glass of wine and think mellow thoughts.
That is easy in Catalonia.
I am beginning to think that envelopes are only used by businesses and that personal use was proscribed by the Holy Inquisition some time ago and placed on an Index which is still in force today!
Meanwhile work on the Belén continues.
More expense in the name of cultural assimilation!
My medication is running low.
I realise that sentence is more like an extract from a low budget horror film script in which the psycho is giving the first intimation that something truly gruesome is about to happen. It is also a simple indication that my little plastic daily boxes are not being filled with the requisite number of ill tasting pastilles.
After my experience of terminal bureaucracy mixed with colourful ineptitude which characterised my first dealings (and second, third, fourth and fifth dealings) with the medical services in my adopted country, I had thought that my vicissitudes had settled down into bearable irritation.
Not so.
In Catalonia when you get a regular prescription they give you two: one for the immediate needs and a second dated a month in the future.
My last (and first) brush with the Catalan pharmacists was when they gave me the wrong medication and then charged me extra when they changed it! But that is old history and has been quite forgotten. Never brought to mind. What gross medical incompetence? Impossible!
Since that first traumatic brush I have complicated matters by not using the second prescription as I had enough medication from Britain which, augmented with the first prescription’s worth of stuff was enough until the present day. So I thought that I would now use the second prescription which was dated the tenth of November. Wrong!
Prescriptions last for ten days after the written date. As I was informed by the triumphantly smug lady pharmacist. I could, at once, see that my usual method of ping ponging between various medical locations was going to proceed in enervating frustration as per bloody usual. With perhaps a visit to Gavá thrown in for good measure. It always seems to make sense to my medical practice anyway.
My return to the doctors’ was to find that the place where I get the new prescriptions had closed five minutes earlier. Four hours later armed with new prescriptions I was forty-five minutes too early for the early evening opening of the chemist. Never mind, I told myself with what can only be defined as insanely self deluding optimism, I will get it done in the large shopping centre in Sant Boi. No pharmacy. Not even for ready money.
But if you think that this story demonstrates how difficult it is to get something simple like a prescription filled, try finding an A5 envelope. Or better still: don’t. Just have a glass of wine and think mellow thoughts.
That is easy in Catalonia.
I am beginning to think that envelopes are only used by businesses and that personal use was proscribed by the Holy Inquisition some time ago and placed on an Index which is still in force today!
Meanwhile work on the Belén continues.
More expense in the name of cultural assimilation!
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