A Medical System You Can Love

This story, if one thinks about it too long, is slightly horrifying. So don't think about it too long, just take pleasure in the fact that it worked out for me.

A medication I use purely for vanity purposes--i.e. so I won't break out like a 15-year-old--did not survive the cross-Atlantic trip well. I had had to have a prescription to get it from my dermatologist, but who knows how things work here? In Egypt there was nothing you couldn't get over the counter, so I decided to give it a shot. I walked into the pharmacy with my bottle of no-longer-functional acne lotion and said look, this apparently doesn't travel well, and do you happen to have the same thing here? So the dermatologist looked at it and came up with something that isn't exactly the same, but had basically the same active ingredients, so, you know, close enough. But she said, "You have to have a prescription for it." Damn. "But I don't have a doctor here in Cape Town," I said, thinking to myself, "and I'm pretty sure my Harvard student traveling insurance is meant to cover things like dengue fever and bot flies, not acne medication." So the pharmacist leaned in and said, "This isn't exactly legal, but welcome to South Africa." Already I'm loving her. "You can't get this without a prescription at any *public* pharmacy. But go right across the road here to this private pharmacy and sometimes they'll just let you pay cash for things without a prescription."

This is awesome.

So I trek across the street to the private pharmacy and it's packed. And it is packed with people who are seriously sick and trying to get stuff like antibiotics and anti-retrovirals (is that stereotypical of me? It probably is. You know it's true though.) So I'm packed in line and I'm scanning the pharmacists, because you gotta pick the right one. Definitely not the old white guy with the Dutch last name, he looks like a rule-follower. Also not the harried-looking woman arguing with an increasingly agitated woman who can't afford her toddler's medication; clearly she's having a day. Nope, the guy at the end, the young one who is flirting with all the women--that's my guy.

So I roll down to him and offer my most charming smile and guileless stranger-in-a-strange land affect as I tell my story, and he cheerfully turns around, takes it off the shelf and hands it to me with a smile and says "That will be 112 rand, miss." Which is literally $14. WHICH IS LESS THAN MY CO-PAY ON THIS MEDICATION AT HOME.

If I needed, you know, insulin or Xanax or anti-hallucinogens, this system would distress me. As it is--$14! I might stock up before I leave here!

By the way, I am having breakfast with Desmond Tutu tomorrow morning, for any who were feeling like their lives were pretty cool and needed to be put in their place.