At the Pharmacy

I have a headache. I feel tired. I drink water. I rest in bed.

Last week I had a sore throat and a small cough. It started on Monday. I felt tired and I could not talk for long. I stayed at home and drank warm tea with honey. I also rested in bed. After three days I felt much better.

A few months ago I had stomach pain for about three days. It started on a Saturday evening, a few hours after I ate dinner at a new restaurant. The pain came and went, but it was always worse after meals. I thought the food might have been the cause, so I decided to eat very simple meals for a couple of days — mostly rice, toast and bananas. I also drank a lot of water and rested whenever I could. After two days I felt much better, and by the end of the week the pain had completely gone.

Hi Sam,

Hope you're doing well. I wanted to tell you about something that's been going on with me. For the past week or so, I've been feeling dizzy on and off — especially when I stand up too quickly. At first I thought it was nothing, but after a few days I decided to go to the pharmacy to check.

The pharmacist was really helpful. She asked me some good questions and worked out that I probably wasn't drinking enough water, and that skipping breakfast wasn't helping either. She suggested drinking more throughout the day, eating regularly, and standing up slowly.

I've been following her advice for a few days now, and I already feel a lot better. She did say that if it got worse or didn't improve in a week, I should see my GP, but I don't think that'll be necessary. It was reassuring to get some clear advice.

Speak soon,
Alex

A couple of years ago, I went through a period of feeling oddly unwell, though it was difficult to put my finger on exactly what was wrong. I wasn't ill, as such — there was no fever, no obvious pain — but I had a persistent low-level fatigue and a kind of pressure behind my eyes that wouldn't quite lift. It lingered for about two weeks before I finally admitted to myself that I ought to do something about it.

Looking back, I think I resisted seeking help partly because the symptoms felt too vague to justify a visit — what was I going to say, that I didn't feel quite right? When I did eventually mention it to a pharmacist, she asked me a few questions I hadn't thought to ask myself. Had I been sleeping properly? Was I drinking enough water? Had anything changed at work? The answers, honestly, weren't flattering: I'd been working long hours, barely stepping outside, and surviving on coffee.

Her advice was unglamorous but, in hindsight, exactly right — sleep more, drink water, get some daylight. Within a week of taking it seriously, I felt noticeably better. It taught me that not every health issue announces itself clearly, and that sometimes the answer is less about treatment than about paying attention.

Most of us, at some point, have caught ourselves downplaying a symptom — brushing off a persistent headache, ignoring a strange twinge, telling ourselves we're probably just tired. There's a particular kind of reluctance, I think, that runs through a lot of cultures, though it takes different shapes: the dread of 'making a fuss', of wasting someone else's time, of being the person who worries unnecessarily. And yet, paradoxically, it is often precisely these people — the quiet, stoic ones — who could do with a bit more fuss-making, not less.

Part of the difficulty is that many symptoms simply don't announce themselves clearly. They arrive as a vague heaviness, a feeling of being 'not quite right', a sense that something's slightly off but nothing you could point to on a diagram. In that grey zone, admitting concern can feel embarrassingly premature. What exactly would you even say? 'I'm not ill, but I don't feel well'? The language itself seems to betray us, offering only blunt categories for what is often a much subtler experience.

There is also, I suspect, a social dimension. To ask for reassurance is to admit uncertainty, and uncertainty, in many professional and family contexts, is still coded as weakness. We would rather soldier on than risk looking dramatic — and so symptoms that ought to have been raised in week one are raised, reluctantly, in month three, by which time they have, as one pharmacist memorably put it to me, 'picked up a life of their own.'

I've come to believe that there is a gentler middle ground. It isn't about rushing to a doctor at every twinge, but about taking our own observations seriously enough to voice them — even tentatively. The act of articulating a worry, to a pharmacist, a GP, or even an honest friend, often halves it. The real fuss, it turns out, isn't in asking the question. It's in the weeks of quiet overthinking we save ourselves by doing so.