Precious Wound

We have come to accept that the staff in the local village pharmacy are pretty useless. While you stand (uncomfortably, on crutches) in the queue they will gossip blithely with locals, place coffee orders with the staff from the bar across the road, and occasionally leave the counter altogether and disappear mysteriously behind a curtain into some back room. When your turn comes they will ask for a detailed account of your accident (out of pure nosiness one assumes), at which point the others in the queue will suddenly stop tutting and cursing under their breath at the slowness of the service, and all remember that they too have a friend/relative/greengrocer who had an accident similar to yours. After listening to a polite amount of stories, advice and well wishing you will make a 'I'd love to talk more, but you know, the queue is now 50 people long and I don't like to keep people waiting' face and finally hand your prescription over.

The woman behind the counter will put on her glasses and stare at it confusedly. She will call over the other staff. They will confer for 5 minutes. They do not stock this product apparently (at this point you will turn to your boyfriend in bemusement because you thought you were only asking for bandages, not treatment for a rare tropical disease). One pharmacist will disappear into the mysterious room. One will get on the telephone to try and source the elusive bandage. The other, inexplicably, will go and start stacking the shelves with baby food. Now there are no staff left to serve the queue and people don't seem so eager to be your new best friend any more. You will leave the pharmacy empty-handed half an hour later, having declined the offer to order in the product and wait 2 weeks for its arrival.

Another week, another prescription. This morning our task was to buy a special giant plaster for the wound on my leg. I elected to stay outside ('um, my leg hurts, I need to sit down'- surely you've got to milk it sometimes) and sent E in, face set in a grim mask of determination. Fifteen minutes later he's back outside; "they've just looked it up on their computer. We'd have to order it in and it costs 150 Euros". I laugh, tell him to forget about it and to just go to the pharmacy in Rome near where he works to pick it up. We go for breakfast at the bar across the road and snigger over our cappuccinos about incompetent pharmacists, wondering which other outlying villages they send the university drop-outs to.

E departs for work and I, out of curiosity and boredom search for the plaster online. To my surprise our incompetent pharmacists got it right- it does cost an unbelievable 150 Euros. A bit more digging reveals that it works using the 'sustained use of hydroactivated silver'. The doctors have asked me to buy one silver plaster a week. Obviously I can't. Any advice?!