wow Jax, I saw your response to the comments on the animals page. That's quite amazing. You're way better at moderating than me haha. I don't think I would have thought to say any of that!

My first day was rough, but my second day was a lot better. I'm hoping it will continue to get better. She really threw me in the deep end with the sharks from the moment I walked in the door. I had never stepped foot in a pharmacy dispensary before in my life, I've only read about the therapeutic properties of all the drug classes in books. I didn't learn specific details like all the brands available of each drug, the different dosage forms (eg. is it a tablet or capsule, what is the colour), the different strengths of tablets (like we learned what the usual dosing range is for a given disease, but not like would that be half a tablet or a full tablet or two tablets, given the strength of each tablet). The minute I walked in, she handed me about 5 prescriptions and made me fill them on my own with no help. I've never filled a prescription before. Boy I had to learn fast. She called me slow too, ouch. She said "You better speed up or you won't last long in the real world". LOL! My biggest problem is finding the drug on the shelf, again because they are all bunched together in alphabetical order, which is fine, but all the brands for the same drug are clumped together, and you have to pick the brand that was ordered, and you have to pick the right strength of pill for that brand. The pharmacist and technician were moving so fast. They would print out the labels, turn around and grab the bottle off the shelf, almost without looking. Meanwhile, I'm there scanning the shelf up and down to find the place, then lifting each bottle one by one to see which one it is. Hopefully I will see them enough times to eventually know all the brand names and dosage forms available. And then there's the counselling part. She threw me right into that too. I had just been there 20 minutes and she said to the customer, "Okay Mrs. X, my student Allegra is going to discuss your medications with you now." Boy was I freaking out. I had about 10 seconds to look up the meds she was on and learn the side effects of it, how to take it, and come up with a plan of how to approach it. According to our marking scheme, we have to have a whole structured conversation with the patients in our counselling. We have to ask them the reason for the prescription to see if it's appropriate, if they have any other medical conditions, allergies, or on any other medications that might interact with the drug they are getting, find out if there conditions are under control (eg. they are getting an osteoporosis drug, but their blood pressure is soaring) and schedule a follow up call if need be. For example, if it is a dose increase from a previous dose and you want to know if they are going to have any side effects. It's pretty hectic too, over 100 prescriptions per day. Maybe that's not hectic by big chain standards, but it's hectic for me. LOL. I'm trying to catch up on relearning my therapeutics during my evenings so I can sound a bit less dumbfounded when I am called upon LOL. I took a break to design a bracelet, as you can see. Sorry about not posting the spider pattern yet. I've started working on fixing the diagram arrows tonight, and that should be done by tonight, and then I'll work on posting it tomorrow. Meanwhile, while I'm doing that, you guys can pick a bracelet bead colour for me!