One day as I drove through the pharmacy window it struck me out of no where, as it normally does. I wondered what they thought of me as I picked up medications, again. By now my local pharmacy has come to know me by first name, by my face, and most likely, my car. Whether I pull up to the window or I go inside, they say hi to me with friendly smiles. They now ask me for the date of birth as a formality, not that we both don’t have it memorized at this point. Sometimes they don’t even ask before I rattle it off. They have become someone I depend on weekly. Then I realized, it’s not just their ability to be open, know my information, or hand me a bottle that I depend on, it’s their ability to make the medication.

For many people a pharmacy is somewhere you get antibiotics, pain medication, and your typical prescriptions. For my family, a pharmacy, a pharmacist, and the techs they work with have been life changing. On a daily basis my son takes a minimum of 7 rounds of medication, some days many, many more, depending on his status. Those medications, for him, are necessary in keeping him alive.

During ER visits and hospitalizations, often the medication given through IVs is life saving. They keep his heart functioning, his airway open, they prevent life ending blood clots, they stop painful infections that could go straight to his heart. These are all miraculous medications, medications that we could not get to without a pharmacy.

Pharmaceutical staff work with chemistry, mathematics, the knowledge of what medications can combine with others, how much to dose at what concentration, which need to be refrigerated, which can’t be kept in the light, which medications have to be in black bags (or I’ve been told they become hazardous), and so on and so forth. The variety of medications available is impossible to count and would be even harder to remember.

Doctors often get all of the credit for ordering the medications that help you get better or stay healthy, depending on what you need it for. However, when you stop to realize how you get that medication, it’s your pharmacy. The pharmacist, the techs, and those that often work behind the scenes. Unheard and unnoticed. But ultimately creating and measuring out those every day or life saving medications.

So to the pharmacy (whether you are local, hospital, home health, or ER), thank you. Thank you for working day in and day out, days, nights, and weekends, thank you. You have more then once provided us with life changing medications. So for every time you have worked behind the scenes and gone unnoticed, for my son, myself, or anyone, Thank you. In this house, you do not go unnoticed. Your presence, on a daily basis, is very, very noticed.