There are two types of health care here, public (the CAJA) and private. If you are here in country with your (legal) residency, you may join CAJA for almost nothing. Very cheap insurance indeed. The private system is far more expensive but costs can be covered by buying any number of international insurance poiicies or by using your friendly, local monopoly, the INS.

So what do Tiger Woods and a lab worker in CAJA have in common?

Well before I answer, I must tell you I am a total 100% sissy when it comes to needles. I am not referring to the knitting type. I am referring to ANY needle that is stuck in ANY part of my body for ANY reason by ANY person (qualified or not) for any alleged medical reason. Should I be captured as a spy, there would be no need of torture. Show me a hypo, and I will sing like the fat lady.

BUT… I have learned if you do anything about 500 times each day, you will become a world class player. Taking blood at Calderon begins at 7 AM or so and continues for most of the day. It is an assembly line. Register, then get in line then wait. (See the photos and click them to enlarge.)

Each of these vampires errr blood technicians, take about 600 – 800 samples each day, and just like the Tiger, they are GOOD. Normal techs can NEVER find my dumb veins, thus it is a stick-and-try again thing. Often 5-10 sticks. It is NOT fun.

Not so with these ladies and gentlemen at Calderon. These are “one stick” specialists and you are GONE… and they do it every freaking time!!! There is no trial and error. No playing “let’s stick the Gringo”. They are the Tiger Woods of blood techs!

The Process

After registering, you wait in a waiting area until you are called. You are then lead into a long room with a long counter. There are several blood stations. Adding to the ambience are gallon jugs of pee. Yup! One thing about a CAJA facility is there is never enough room for everything. A storage room for urine would, I guess, be totally out of the question.

They then park your butt in a chair, the tech does his/her rubber strap thing, taps your arm a couple of times, sticks you ONCE with a REALLY sharp needle, and you are DONE.

I have now had about eight of these visits and, at least at THIS hospital, I no longer fear blood tests.

Oh… and if you ever get there, ask for Manrique or Francisca.

Tell ‘em TicoGrande sent you!

The services are quite different. You can get an injection or you can buy a pill. Yeah… one pill… or 6… or 11. Many people here cannot afford a whole bottle, so they can buy just what they need for 1 or 2 days, then return to buy more if needed.

One of the good… or bad… things about a Costa Rican drugstore (aka droguería but far more common in Costa Rica, farmacia) is that you can also buy just about any prescription drug you want without a prescription.

While this seems like a great deal, and maybe it is, when a person makes the decision to self-medicate, to buy a prescription drug without a physician’s advice, the burden of making the correct decision is removed from the hands of the doctor and placed squarely in the hands of the person buying that prescription.

I was faced with this a bit less than a year ago when I decided to quit my multi-pack per day smoking habit. A doctor buddy in the US recently quit smoking by using Wellbutrin, an anti depressant. At first blush, this seemed a bit over the top as I had heard that anti-depressants have a lot of side effects and can have many interactions with other drugs. In any case, they should not be taken without a doctor’s approval. Still… my habit of smoking 4-5 packs a day was a tad over the top as well, so I decided to do some investigating.

My friend swore that taking Wellbutrin daily really cut back on the withdrawal symptoms and I believed him, as he was a 2 pack per day man himself. I checked with my local farmacia and, of corse, Wellbutrin was available from stock, no prescription needed. At $56.00 for 15 day supply, this was not going to be a cheap experiment, but 4 packs (minimum) of cigarettes per day @ $1.25 per pack was also not cheap. Actually, $150.00 per month if you do the math, so $112.00 for Wellbutrin was not too out of line.

So I got onto the Internet and downloaded a whopping 149 pages of documentation and drug trial information about Wellbutrin. I decided there was nothing in my health profile that indicated taking the drug would cause problems, and it could do me no harm based on what I read. If successful, my health would certainly be at less risk than continuing the smoking.

Surprisingly, the Wellbutrin worked exactly as my buddy told me it would, and I pretty much painlessly stopped smoking. It’s been several months now and while I of course occasionally want to smoke, so far I have resisted. I stopped taking the Wellbutrin after about 90 days. BTW, you do not just QUITE taking an anti-depressant. That was NOT covered in all the literature, and stopping cold turkey is a no-no. You have to wind down over several weeks or a month. I spent 4-5 pretty nasty days learning this little fact. Oh well…

My purpose in writing this is not so much to relate my quit smoking thing, but to warn those of you who may be moving, traveling, or living Costa Rica that you must truly be responsible for how you use the drug stores here. For example, taking too many antibiotics can result in your body creating antibiotic resistant strains. A drug interaction, even with a non-prescription drug and be dangerous. Then you really have a problem.

Do your homework and use the Internet as a resource. It contains a staggering about of information needed to safeguard your health.

In any case, I learned something very important today, and I must share it. My doctor tells me I must take Metamusil on a daily basis. Actually, he told me this last year… but I ignored him as 1. I hate those Metamusil commercials, 2. I want to do nothing to help fund them, and 3. taking Metamusil is somehow like giving in to the fact that I am getting olde… and I hate that.

I guess I actually learned three things from all this.

A. It generally is not a good idea to ignore your doctor even if you hate Metamusil or getting old. It would be easy to dispel too much info here about my internal processing plant… but I expect you catch my drift.

B. Metamusil isn’t so bad if you mix it with fresh squeezed orange juice and drink it down promptly (and quickly),

and most important…

C. Do NOT wait more than maybe 1-2 minutes before you drink it (the timing to begin after adding the Metamusil to the OJ)!!

I got busy this morning and let it sit on my desk for about 30 minutes. BIG mistake!
Metamusil, left to its own devices, chemically bonds with the OJ to become this HUGE orange booger. It is gross beyond imagination. I drank it (ate it?) as I was too damned cheap to waste the OJ or the Metamusil, but I can assure you this was a lesson learned!

I am sharing this with al of you as from the email I receive, my regular readers are quite possibly of a Metamusil age. For those of you for whom this does not apply, know this: Getting olde sucks.

Bottoms up!