Typhoon Ondoy brought so much devastation in our lives. My family and our dog stayed on the roof for seventeen hours waiting for the flood which reached our second floor to subside. We lost so many of our things, and the first practical problem that we faced was how to replace everything from toothbrush to clothes. We needed a lot of things and we needed some of them immediately. It was already late afternoon when we came down to the business of surviving the next few days. We needed medicine for my brother who stepped on a barbed wire in flood water and the other who stepped on broken glasses. We also needed antibiotics for those who waded in dirty flood water (just to be on the safe side). And of course, we needed toiletries and some food to tide us over. I was wearing old clothes from my cousin’s wardrobe and so I wanted to be in and out immediately. Good thing our temporary evacuation site was near Mercury Drug Store Katipunan Branch.

Mercury Drug Store is a leading chain of drugstores in the Philippines. I was not a big fan of Mercury before because in my previous experience with them, they did not push for generics medicine. However, this time I was impressed. It was like a one-stop shop where I picked up the medicines we needed, toiletries and some food. The choices were not as many as the regular groceries, but the choices were pretty good. All the toiletries that I traditionally used were all there. They even had some bread there (Gardenia).

I was particularly impressed with their medicines counter. When it was my turn to serve, I explained to them that my mother’s medicines were flooded and we needed to replace them. My mother had a heart condition and needed her medicines badly. I also told her that I could not produce her prescription because it was misplaced in the frenzy of fleeing from the flood. The lady was nice enough and took a look at the discarded medicine and sold us replacement for it. For the generic medicines, she was sympathetic with our plight and she understood that we needed to save as much as we could and so she recommended medicines that were the cheapest but which she knew by experience to be the most effective. I do not think it was an isolated experience because while waiting for the prescription to be filled, I heard how their pharmacists handled the customers there (and there were a quite a few of them). Each one was given enough attention even though each had a different concern. There was
no idle chitchat between the pharmacists but just professional interaction. The thing that impressed me the most was when I returned a few days later to the same drugstore because I was looking a medicine for my mother (which was not available in all the other drugstores that I went to), and they had it on stock.

Rating: 9