Medication

The Springmans take lots of medications! They are all important, but among the most important are those needed by Ellie and Kat. Ellie has ADHD. She's been diagnosed for years and the medication that has helped her through school is Adderall--brand name for dextroamphetamine or amphetamine salt. She also takes an antidepressant. Katarinna is an anxiety child. She is a white-knuckler through much of life. She takes an anti-anxiety medication that keeps things manageable for her most of the time. My biggest concern about coming on this great adventure was the question, "How will we get the medications we need in Europe?" We decided to take the leap and try to solve the problem here. Today we made our first attempt at getting our prescription medications. We received a couple of surprises--good and bad.

Our goal today was to see if we could get medications for Ellie and Kat. We were much surprised to find that getting Prozac (Ellie's anti-depressant) and Sertraline (aka Zoloft--Kat's anti-anxiety med) were super easy. They are not prescription medications here. They are "behind-the-counter" medications. You ask the pharmacist for them and they are supplied from behind the counter without prescription. We bought a package of Prozac, a package of "Sertralina," and a package of Vitamin C for a total cost of $35 euros. The Vitamin C was about $16 euros, so the other two medications were not much more than our US insurance co-pays.

The Vitamin C we obtained is not in pill form. The only Vitamin C they have here (in this town) is something like Alka Seltzer. It is a tablet that dissolves in water and you drink it. We'll try it!

Adderall, however, is going to be a problem. We were informed that we cannot obtain that as a medication in Spain. It is not sold. We were told that we would have to see a doctor to figure out if another medication could be used because we would not be able to obtain Adderall in Spain. We are even wondering if the Adderall we currently have is an illegal substance here even in prescribed form. We've talked this over with Ellie and have decided to conserve her supply of Adderall as much as possible by splitting doses, and by withholding doses on non-critical days, thereby making our current supply last as long as possible. We're hopeful that this will work out. Ellie has been getting along surprisingly well on some lower doses provided by her doctor before we left. She has informed us that she's better able to control herself. We were instructed that she would become less dependent on the medication as she matured, so this will be an interesting experiment!

John has written to an online pharmacy in the UK to inquire about that country's laws/regulations concerning dextroamphetamine. We hope we can get some when we get to the UK in June. Just another part of the adventure! Below are pictures of what we bought in the Farmacia today.