I’m puzzled. I don’t know whether I was helped or taken for a ride! Went to the chemist to get a prescription filled for some cortisone cream for my face. Now for those of you lucky enough to be rashless no matter how stressed you get, you may not know this, but cortisone is bad. It thins your skin, and the more you use it, the less effective it becomes…then when you stop you get v.bad withdrawral. Basically, it sucks. I know this, and I don’t care. I use 1% cream on my face (fairly weak) and that’s what I was going to buy more of. The guy at the chemist (he may have been Austrian, he had a very strong accent) had other ideas.

He didn’t even fill my prescription!! Instead he led me from product to product, told me that the top I was wearing didn’t let my skin breathe, told me to only wear cotton, instructed me to not drink, smoke or stress, to drink lots of water and eat organic. But he said all this in a nice, concerned way, so I wasn’t horrified, I was merely gobsmacked and let myself be led around the shop. I hesitate to say I was meek, but I was close. I ended up with MediHoney Cream, other stuff that smells like fresh road tar, antihistamine no-itch tablets, scary cod-liver/zinc/vitamin-cloaked-in-cherry-flavour syrup (if you haven’t experienced cod-liver-cloaked-by-cherry I have to tell you that it’s not completely successful…think cherry flavoured tuna? Yike.) Um, oh, as a special concession for really bad days he let me get .5% cortisone cream - but you can buy it straight off the shelf, so how much clout can it have?!

This all came to $35 - and as my evil prescription probably would have been about $10 less I wasn’t too unhappy. He encouraged me to come back in two weeks to see him and show him how I was going. It kind of made me feel nice, because I’m just used to going to doctors who take one look at me and throw the aforementioned prescription at me. I did go to a specialist once when the rash mutated after a three day canoe trip…he did the same thing.

How sad is this. I’m supposed to be at Mari and Gil’s going away bash, but I look like a skink and realised (belatedly) that I have no car :o(
Sorry Mari and Gil. I am a bad fellow bridesmaid. Sorry Lisa, I know I said I’d see you there. D’oh. Instead spent the night applying the various potions and cruising ebay (so addictive).