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Monday, October 18, 2010

Difficulties in Purchasing items

A few days ago Dave asked me something simple - could I please pick him up some Dayquil? He had a slight cold and wanted to take some medicine. Simple, right? well.....

I walk down to Boots. Find the pharmacy department. After a quick scan of the medicines, none of the brands are the same. Lemsip, Nurofen, Medised, Tixylix and Benilyn. Nope. Don't know any of those. Hmm.... okay.... start looking at the labels. Some of the medicines I've heard of - caffeine, aspirin. Those are good things to start with. But then it ends. Paracetamol, and other unknown substances make up their medicines.

 I figure I'll ask the lady behind the desk. First I try asking her about Dayquil - a simple cold medicine. She has no clue what I'm talking about. But I thought that might be the case. So I try acetaminophen. She looks even more confused! Seriously?!  She tells me she hasn't heard of that before, and doesn't know what it is. How does she not know what acetaminophen is?!

So, I resort to asking her to take several different medicines off the shelves and try to study them to see what is in them. The poor lady thought I was nuts. I kept getting the eye from her. She probably thought I would run off with all the pills and make meth or something like that :-)

I finally picked some out that looked like they might be promising. I asked to purchase them. She told me no - I could only buy one or two of them, but not all three. I had to settle for two of them. For future reference, I got the Benilyn and Nurofn. I think Dave liked the Benilyn.

4 comments:

Andrea, said...

Geez that's weird. Why would they not let you buy all of them, do they not want your money? or were they all pseudophedrine based and you could use them in a weird illegal way? How frustrating.

Catharina said...

Heavens! Had never thought that something that ordinary would be so complicated!

Gail Wallace said...

On one of our trips there I bought lotion....only it turned out to be shampoo! I wondered why it was so sticky when I rubbed it in! had a different name - don't remember what it was, but had the word lotion in it :) Before long you'll have all this lingo down!

Boo, Jax and Bo said...

They call acetaminophen paracetamol in the UK. The pharmacist has probably never heard it called anything else. Just ask what you'd take for a cold that won't p ut you to sleep... I think lemsip might be ok, but I can't remember off the top of my head if it's non-drowsy or not. Good luck, the pharmacy can be confusing!