A Strange Day

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As I woke up this morning I had the feeling this was going to be an awful day, but in hindsight it turned out not so bad. That should teach me!

So even if I overslept a little, I got to my work place in time for my meeting with one of my staff members. We were going to discuss a few problems in his performance lately. As he sometimes has a tendency to shut off all lines of communication when he feels pressured and just respond with "yes", "no" or "I don´t know", much like a teenager in a bad mood ,even though he is thirty-one years old I had been making plans on how to handle this.

Amazingly enough we had an open and honest exchange of views and after that could reach an agreement on how to move ahead.

After that I had to rush to my doctors appointment and got there just in time. Usually they let me right in but this time no one came for me so after fifteen minutes in the waiting room I mad inquiries. As it turned out my doctor had moved to new offices and had forgotten to inform me about me. When I made a telephone call to his offices the nurse was very sorry about the oversight and gave me a new appointment in the afternoon and the new address.

The meeting with my sweet Hungarian doctor was swift and good. Have I told you earlier that he is one of those very rare kinds of doctors that actually listens to what the patients are saying?

Well I told him about my strange mood swings and that I felt that my mood curve had a declining trend. I also told him about my occasional problems falling asleep. He increased my dosage of Cipralex and allowed me the flexibility to choose what dose to take between 10-20 mg depending on how I feel. I was also prescribed a non-addictive sleeping medicine I could use on those occasions.

I had some difficulties getting my prescription filled for the sleeping drug. Sweden used to have a well-functioning chain of state-owned pharmacies up until a few years ago. The conservative government in their infinite wisdom decided to carry out a pharmacy reform in which "pharmacies would be improved and made more efficient by increasing competition". As a result of this reform anyone with certain qualifications can start a pharmacy and some of the earlier pharmacies have been privatized.

The big benefit of the reform is that you today can buy the most common nonprescription drugs at gas-stations and supermarkets but for the rest it has resulted in a big mess where the pharmacies now only carry a few of the medicines and look more like cosmetics stores than pharmacies.

Earlier every pharmacy could tell you where you could go to get your prescription filled if they did not have the medicine themselves. Now you have to drive around yourself to at least three different of the new chains and check if they have it. Usually the new private chains don´t have many medicines, I am suspecting they only sell the thousand most common prescription drugs, while they leave the rest to the old state-owned pharmacies.

Finally after asking at six different pharmacies in two towns I could get my prescription filled, by the state-owned chain of course.