Hi friend!
Thanks for reading my latest travel story. Today, let’s head down to Mexico for a short stint. While I’m not talking about street dogs or freshly caught shrimp for tacos, you can head over to that post from February if you’d like a little more color on my RV trip to Mexico.
If you’d like to share my experience of Mexico pharmacies, here’s a handy button.
I laid out a piece of paper that had been folded and unfolded repeatedly, the edges stained from the oil on my hand in my lap. In black ink, I had written a series of pharmaceutical words. In the column next to it were Spanish words in purple ink. I hoped my research was right and that I had translated my medications correctly. One last time, I glanced over the sheet and took a breath, then stepped out of my car.
As I stepped onto the ground, dust poufed up around my feet.
It was sometime in February, somewhere in Mexico. A warm and dry day as the dust had announced on that coastal town.
A dirt road had led me to the small pharmacy with a bright orange door that was propped open, a screendoor closed with a tiny bell that hit it when I opened it. Inside: two tiny islands of snacks. Chips, sodas, gum. A few plastic toys. An oscillating fan blew warm air across the tiny store. This was a pharmacy? I swallowed my anxiety as it clung to the sides of my esophagus.
“Hola,” I presented myself to the pharmacist behind the counter. “Necesito muchas medicinas.”
His hooded eyes looked across me and my partner who had trailed behind me and I thrust my paper onto the counter.
I tapped on the top two in purple, “Tienes estos? Este y este es más importante.”
He looked over my paper, nodded.
“I have one. The others don’t arrive until Friday,” he said.
With that, my anxiety slithered further down. English. And much better than my clunky Castilian-accented Spanish could ever be.
The man behind the counter explained to me the different versions of the English vs Mexican medicines. Same manufacturer. Same drug. Different stickers. I already knew this, but was relieved to hear it from him, not a website.
“Cuanto questo?” I asked, not willing to abandon my Spanish yet. He typed for a moment, then turned his computer screen around. Four dollars for one that I regularly paid fifty dollars for in the states.
Did I need insurance? A prescription for any of these? No. Not here in Mexico.
“But,” he told me, “if you want to go find the rest of your medicines, go to all the other places in town.” Rattled off a list, not by street names, but by points of interest. Which ones to avoid. Across from a cell phone place. A kilometer past the pescaderia. Don’t go to the one downtown.
“They’ll cost different everywhere you go,” he said. I nodded, thanking him gratuitously as I shoved medications into my oversized purse, then exited the building onto the dusty street.
“Wow,” I said, “wow.”
I ran around the next four days between various farmacias, stopping to buy an eyeliner at one, a bag of spicy candies at another, and filled my pockets with thousands of dollars worth of medications. Thousands of dollars in the states. Less than $300 in Mexico. Six-plus months of medication, all without a prescription. If you’ve taken medications all your life, it’s pretty easy to know what you need. I don’t exactly need a doctor telling me every three months that yep, I still need these to survive.
The US health system is all kinds of messed up. But this is not the moral of this story, because we are all well aware of that.
The moral of this story is that most times, people want to help, want to be of service, or pass on some nugget of advice. Helpers. With a simple slip into my native language, the man at the first pharmacy I’d entered into in Mexico had spent time outlining the things I should consider. Why? Just to help.
I was lucky that day.
Every other pharmacy I went to over the next several days, people only spoke Spanish, no English at all, and none pointed me in the direction of other places to go. It may have been luck. Or it could have been just the right place at the right time to find the person who wanted to help me navigate my stained list of medications.
Thanks for traveling with me,
Sasha
Down the Rabbit Hole
Right now, Mexico is struggling with black market fake Covid vaccines. Even though only the government is allowed to distribute the vaccination, there are many that are willing to risk a fake vaccine as only 11% of the population has received the vaccine.
I often think of Fred Rogers and his famous quote to “look for the helpers,” when times are desperate, but it’s not just desperate times that the helpers show up. They’re all around you, all the time. If you don’t see them, it’s time to step up to the plate and be the helper.