What happened when I tried to refill my prescription

What happened when I went into a pharmacy in Costa Rica to refill my prescription was a total surprise.

I'm still in Costa Rica, and I plan to be here for a few more months before I go back to the US. Then I'll get in my motorhome, and head to the North Carolina mountains to stay cool during the summer.

I brought a lot of the pills with me that I take daily, but I was getting low on some of them. Yesterday I went down the mountain and into town to get some more pills.

Here you don't actually get a prescription refilled. You tell the pharmacist the name of the medication you want, and he sells it to you. You can buy any medication you want without a prescription (except for pain pills and narcotics).

You won't get this kind of treatment in the US

The pharmacy only had one box (which was a 30-day supply) of the pills I needed. My Spanish is still not very good, and the pharmacists didn't speak any English, but she used sign language to tell me to wait, and she would be right back. I didn't know what she was going to do, but I stayed put.

She went out the front door, and I saw her turn and head down the sidewalk. In a little while, she came back in. She had gone three blocks down the street and around the corner to another pharmacy. She brought back three boxes of the pills I wanted from the other pharmacy.

By the way, while I've been here, I haven't seen any pills in a bottle. They are all on a card like the ones shown in the picture at the top of the page. You can buy one pill, a card with eight or ten pills, or you can buy the whole box with several cards in it.

Bottom line: Many things in Costa Rica are not necessarily better or worse than in the US. They're just different. I have to say that I've found the people here extremely friendly, and they go out of their way to be helpful.