The Second Question

I have worked behind the counter of the same pharmacy in Kraków's Old Town for six years, and if there is one thing I have learned that I did not learn in five years of pharmacy school, it is this: almost nobody tells you what they actually came in to ask. They tell you the first question, and if you answer only the first question, you will have helped them with nothing that matters, and I want to explain what I mean by this, because I think it applies to more than pharmacies.

A man came in three winters ago and asked me, in the tone people use for weather, whether paracetamol was safe to take with his blood pressure medication. It is a reasonable question and I answered it, yes, generally, at normal doses, and he thanked me and turned to go, and I almost let him, because the shop was busy and there was a line behind him, and this is the first thing I want to say: the moment someone thanks you and turns away is exactly the moment the real question is still sitting in their chest, unasked, because the first question was easy to say out loud and the real one is not.

I said, before he reached the door, is the headache new. He stopped. He said his wife had been having them for three weeks, every afternoon, and she wouldn't go to the doctor because their daughter's wedding was in five weeks and she didn't want anyone finding something wrong with her before it. He wasn't asking about paracetamol at all. He was asking, without knowing how to phrase it, whether it was reasonable to be frightened. I told him it was, and that fear is not a diagnosis, and that finding nothing wrong five weeks before a wedding was a much better outcome than finding something wrong five weeks after one, and he went home, I assume, and I don't know what happened to his wife, that's the part of this job nobody prepares you for, you rarely get the ending, but I know he came back a month later for something unrelated and told me she'd gone, and it was nothing, migraines from stress, and he wanted to say thank you, though what he was thanking me for wasn't the paracetamol advice at all.

Here is what I want to pass on, because I think it's useful outside a pharmacy too, in any conversation where someone comes to you carrying something they haven't fully unpacked yet.

First: the question people ask you is almost never the question. It's the socially acceptable container for the question. "Is this safe to take with that" is a container for "am I dying and too scared to ask directly." "How long does this cough medicine take to work" is sometimes a container for "I've been coughing for six weeks and I'm frightened and I don't want to be told to see a doctor because I'm afraid of what they'll say." You cannot always find the real question, and you shouldn't go hunting for one that isn't there — most of the time someone really does just want to know about paracetamol — but you should leave a door open long enough for the real question to walk through if it wants to.

Second: the way you leave that door open is not by asking "is everything okay," which people can deflect in one syllable, but by asking something specific and factual that only makes sense if there's more to the story — is the headache new, how long has this been going on, has anything changed recently — a question shaped like information-gathering rather than like concern, because concern is what people brace against and information-gathering is what people, oddly, relax into. I didn't ask that man if he was worried about his wife. I asked if the headache was new. The second question did the work the first one never could have.

Third, and this is the one I had to learn the hard way, over years, not from any professor: you have to actually be willing to hear the answer, and stand there for it, even when there's a line behind the person, even when it's inconvenient, because the moment you signal — through the shop being busy, through your body already turning to the next customer, through your voice being one degree too quick — that you don't have room for the real answer, people put it back in their pocket, and they don't take it out again. Most people ask their real question exactly once, in whatever container they can manage, and if the container gets answered but the contents don't, they go home carrying it alone. I am not a doctor and I am not a therapist. I sell medicine over a counter. But I have learned that most people who come to me aren't only looking for a box off a shelf — they're looking for someone to notice that their hand is shaking slightly as they ask, and I think that's true of nearly every counter any of us stands behind, in whatever job we have, if we're willing to stay for the second question.

Read in the app, leave a resonance, discover more stories.