Spring in Japan is the most dreadful season to me. I have been suffering from serious hay fever since I started living in the country. If the symptoms are combined with a cold, a situation that usually occurs, it simply turns into an unescapable hell in my case. Whenever I have a cold, I will develop a persistent cough that might last as long as 3 weeks. A cold induced by hay fever, as pollen is also full of germs, makes me sick of life, especially the spring break is usually the longest vacation I can have in a year when kids still go to school and kindergarten regularly and I can finally work on research. However, coughs just prevent everything from happening.
What is worse this year is that, there has been an unbelievable shortage of cough medicine across Tokyo since last year due to the spread of COVID and influenza. Last November, I visited three pharmacies to finally get some cough pills, but it was still a substitute medicine and was only half of the amount that was prescribed. The pharmacy said that it could only give me half of the amount because they need to secure their stock for other patients, too. Last week, I went to get prescribed cough medicine, too, but there wasn't any. In the second pharmacy that I visited, the pharmacist contacted the doctor to change the prescription, but I did not know exactly what it was. A week's portion is never enough to help me recover, but something is better than nothing perhaps. I have been coughing to the extent that my collar bones ache, and the muscle on my belly starts to develop. It is also a season when there are many school and kindergarten events in which I need to appear. My coughs pain me and scare others at the same time.
Therefore, after the prescription was all taken, I decided to begin a home pharmacy by concocting my own herbal medicine. Some childhood memory about the names of some herbal medicine for cough remain clear, and I collected whatever I could get, processed them into power, and swallowed my own concoction. They are helping, I feel. Perhaps it is just psychological effect, but I have nothing but trusting myself as an amateurish apothecary.
I remember one of my wishes these years is to study the science of herbal medicine to prepare for my second career. There is probably a light shed on the career path.
