Sinus Rinse - nice name!

At the pharmacy today...

Can you really call what we have these days a pharmacy? Walgreens, Eckerd, and RiteAid all look like mini-marts. Or a scaled-down K-Mart. I've switched from Eckerd to Walgreens recently. In our little neighborhood of Ghent (like a small Capitol Hill in Seattle, without the hill because we don't have hills in southeastern Virginia) we have four pharmacies. The three I mentioned above, and a REAL one, on Colley Ave, struggling to stay alive but which I don't visit because there's only this teeny-tiny parking lot they share with a church and Starbucks. We were fine with Eckerd. Then in came RiteAid two blocks away. Hate RiteAid. Their aisles are diagonal and confusing and they are always moving products around so you can't find anything. Then in came Walgreens, which all of Ghent and surrounding neighborhoods fought like hell, me too. Then I discovered that their photo processing was better than Eckerd. Then I discovered that they are less likely than Eckerd to run out of certain medications which, during one refill when Eckerd wasn't able to get a certain medicine for two weeks, Eckerd offered to send my prescription over to Walgreens. Besides, who needs a 24-hr pharmacy anyway?

Ya, well, it's nice. At 10PM their drive-thru pharmacy drop-off/pick-up is still open. That's nice. The pharmacist talks to you. That's nice, too. And remembers you. That's extra nice. It almost feels like a REAL pharmacy.

So...picking up where I left off. At the pharmacy today, picking up medicine refills, I spotted this thing called SINUS RINSE. Which is a hell of a lot nicer moniker than NASAL IRRIGATION or, as the pharmacist called it, NASAL DOUCHE. She really did. She also told me that you should use un-iodized salt because the iodine can exacerbate (nifty word) acne, even mild acne (as in, adults who have to really work to fight off the zits). This stuff uses the same ingredients: saline and bicarbonate, a.k.a., salt and baking soda. 100 packets. So ya, I could have gone to the supermarket and gotten a container of uniodized salt and more baking soda, but I didn't feel like it and ten bucks didn't seem like too much a price to pay for a little convenience. Besides I was thinking of making little packets anyway. They did it for me.