Finding My Path…

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of questions as to how I ended up being a pharmacist.  Truth be told, I kind of fell into it.  I have yet to meet anyone in this field that grew up wanting to become a pharmacist, and I am no exception.  It just so happened that a local grocery store pharmacy was the first to call me back when I was looking for a part time job while I was taking basic college courses.  The only appeal was that it paid pretty well, was close to home, and worked around my class schedule.

Once I started however, it opened up an entire new world.  Sure, everyone has seen the pink bubble gum ear infection medicine, or heard about the infamous “pain pills”.  But I looked at the hundreds of bottles on the shelves and realized that there was a lot that I didn’t know.  That fact was amplified when I attempted to read the package insert for one of the bottles and had no idea what any of the information meant.  It was frustrating enough that I decided to go to school to figure out how to make sense of the chemical structures and scientific language.  And I did.

Now, years after graduation, I still find pharmacy exciting.  It’s a dynamic profession, always evolving and innovating.  And though my full-time focus is on quality of care issues, I haven’t lost the desire to learn or to educate patients about medications.  Strangely enough, I still remember the first medication that I tried to understand…Isoniazid, used for the treatment of tuberculosis…