Emotions
that words can’t describe are created when the fire of a passion is lit inside
someone for the first time. Questions
start racing into someone’s mind, puzzle pieces start to fall into place,
excitement is in every breath taken, a thirst for more has begun, it is almost
like an addiction. The brain
cannot turn it off once it has begun. Gabrielle is right on, I do plan on my profession being intertwined in the medical sales world. This post is about how my passion arose on a wintery night during my
freshman year of high school.
Growing
up I played three sports, football, wrestling, and baseball. One for every season, as I transitioned
into high school, I continued all three.
After football was over I joined the wrestling team. Two months into the season after our first
meet, I found out what the common wrestling skin diseases were. Needless to say I found out the hard
way what these skin diseases were when I got one.
When
my wrestling coaches found out I had a skin disease, they sent me to the nurse
who sent me to the doctor. The
doctor confirmed that I had in fact contracted a skin disease. Which was the same diagnosis of all the
people before her, she just had the power to. Anyhow, my doctor sent me with a prescription to the
pharmacy, and that is where the ball got rolling.
As
my dad and I pulled into the Hy-vee that night we noticed the store was busier
than normal. A blizzard had
everyone stocking up on groceries in case the snow became too much. My dad had to get a few things himself
for us at the store, and being a freshman in high school he trusted me to pick
up my medication myself.
As
I waited in line I noticed the pharmacists behind the counter continue to go in
and out of rows with shelves upon shelves of medicine. Like a library but the books were
boxes. They had something for the
three people in front of me without fail, so when I came up I told them what I
needed, and within minutes it was taken out of a box, placed in an orange
container and packaged up for me.
It
was then I asked the pharmacist helping me, where did all that medicine come
from? He looked at me puzzled, and
said, “do you mean who made them? or who represents and sells them?” The second part of that phrase was the
little force needed to start an avalanche of thoughts, questions, and new
ideas. Since I was the last one at
the counter that day, I talked this poor guy’s ear off.
From
what I gathered, at one point in time, a company produced each box of
medicine. There are tons of
companies out there dedicated to producing medicine for specific purposes. A sales person then represents each
type of medicine, their title is called a pharmaceutical sales rep, and they
explain what their product does to doctors. What I gathered from that was every box, every container of
medicine I saw that night had a sales person behind it, promoting it to
doctors. There were easily ten
rows of medicine, with shelves as high as arm’s reach and about as long as a
typical high school classroom.
By
now my dad had gathered the three or four items he needed and realized that I
was still at the pharmacy counter clearly keeping the worker form leaving. Where the worker left off in our talk,
I continued with my dad all the way home.
At the same time I may have been responsible for making my dad’s bald
spot a couple hairs bigger that night.
A lot of questions he didn’t know the answer too and he became a little
frustrated.
When
we got home though, I told my mom what I had talked about at the pharmacy. She looked at my dad said, “why don’t
you call Chris and have him answer some of these questions?” My dad had a light bulb go off. Chris, the man my mom was talking
about, is a pharmaceutical sales rep.
This was a huge piece to the puzzle that was taking shape in my mind.
Chris
Roberts was the right man to go to.
He explained to me what a typical day is like for him, the kinds of
drugs he represents and a typical patient who uses them. He went onto explain the best part of
his job was hearing how a patient’s life changed because of medicine that their
doctor recommended that Chris promoted to the doctor. In college I was fortunate enough to get an assignment to
interview a salesperson I had to know personally. In that interview with him he went more in-depth on what he
did, he was more than happy to help.
Pharmaceutical
sales reps have a tough job. They
are rewarded for working hard and sticking to their plan and have a reputable
career. Chris sets goals every
week and he tracks himself on how he is doing. There will be other posts to stay tuned for, I will go more
into detail about Chris’s job, my experience in the health care world, and
topics I plan to have discussions with other interested people.
Until next time, laugh with everyone, laugh hard,
Riley
Banach
 |
| A pharmaceutical sales rep at work. |
 |
| A pharmacist hard at work, like the one who helped me. |
No comments:
Post a Comment