Going to the Pharmacist

Pharmacies in France work a bit like going to a general practitioner: you can go into one, tell them your ailments, and they give you medicine. There are plenty of medicines they can't give you without a prescription...but it can save you a good bit of money to go to them first to find out whether you need to go to the doctor.

My eye has been bothering me for a day or two, and today I finally saw in it what I'd expected: a stye. I've had them before, and I usually put a warmed teabag on it several times throughout the day until it goes away. (I read somewhere online that there's something healthy in the tea leaves that helps heal the stye.) This time, I decided to go see if the pharmacist had some handy-dandy drop I could use instead.

First, however, I would need to find the word for 'stye.' "That's easy," you think to yourself. "You just look up 'stye' in your dictionary and voila! You know the word." Not so fast, smarty pants. (Master Yoda, I'm looking at you.)

I did that, and both wordreference and Google Translate both gave me two words for the one word 'stye': orgelet and porcherie. In that second word, however, is the root word for 'pig,' (porc), and I suddenly realized: eek! Pig stye! I don't want to walk into the pharmacist and tell them, "I have a pig stye in my eye." Might be funny because of the rhyme in English (and the sense), but in French, eegads. That's a quick route to a culture shock moment in the pharmacy right there.

I looked up "orgelet" in Google images and sure enough it's the right word. A little shy, I walked up to the pharmacist and said, "I have an, um, orgelet in my eye. Is there a medicine I can put on it?" She nodded and explained that they have some drops they could give me, but if it didn't get better I'll need to go to the doctor.

She apparently didn't know about the tea bag trick. She also didn't appear to realize that her understanding my question, answering it, and treating me like I was 100% normal, (instead of the "oh no, a foreigner with a charming yet incomprehensible accent" attitude), without even batting an eye helped me take another step towards feeling adjusted here.

I got my drops and felt proud of learning a new word and side-stepping a culture shock moment in the pharmacy. We'll see if the drops work better than the tea bag.