Take Care of Your Lungs
It was a Tuesday, on December 7, 1983. I walked into my new compounding pharmacy, Pacifica Compounding Pharmacy, to the sight of bare walls and exposed pipes. It was exciting, but I was nervous. Oh, I spent countless hours studying and received my Doctor of Pharmacy degree from USC. I had extensive experience in the lab and working at a pharmacy too. I obtained my license to practice from the California State Board of Pharmacy. My biggest fear? Well, my biggest fear was that my first patient transaction would actually be somebody walking in to get change for a twenty dollar bill. To my surprise, it wasn’t.
I filled nine prescriptions that day. A doctor walked in and asked if we could make progesterone suppositories and I told him we could, responded with a simple, “yes”. And we did.
It was just a whirlwind after that, finding chemicals, lab space and equipment. And then, of course, the formulations. We would not just be filling prescriptions, but we would be finding solutions for patients who needed something specific to them, personalized. A lot has changed since that day, but we’re still finding the highest quality chemicals, making sure our lab is operating at the highest level of standards, and that we have the absolute best equipment to create our compounds.
I still have my very first dollar that was handed to me for payment, that’s hung here on the wall today. It reminds me how we started and why we started, letting me know that things take time. With our time, care and effort, we can make a difference.
Forty years seems to have gone by in a flash, yet, in other ways, I feel like I can’t remember doing anything else. We had a neon sign with a palm tree, that’s tucked away in storage somewhere. Who knows, maybe I’ll pull it out and hang it on the wall.
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