 Hey guys, my name is Garrett Lamoro. I'm from Walker County, Alabama, and I'm a 2020-2021 state ambassador for 4-H. And here today we have Anna Brooklear. She's a pharmacist at Brooklear Pharmacy, and I'm going to let her introduce herself. My name's Anna Brooklear. I graduated from Auburn in 1983 from the School of Pharmacy. My brother and father are also pharmacists, and they also graduated from the School of Pharmacy there in Auburn. My experience is a little over 30 years at UAB, which was fun because UAB was innovative, but so was my family's business, very innovative on the cutting edge. So I also worked at Brooklear Pharmacy, which is my family's business. So I worked at UAB for about 30 years, but one day a week I still worked overtime at the drugstore to keep up that end of my license to see what's going on in the outside world. So I've had two jobs, and that's it. All my life I've had two jobs. Okay, and I have a few questions for you for the kids who want to know and go into that field. What influenced you the most to be in this field and profession? I think I had been around people who were physicians and nurses and pharmacists, and I was very interested in the medical field because there's a lot of elderly people that really don't know how to take their medicine, and I watched sort of helping my dad at the drugstore, and like I said, just I saw how a lot of the nurses carried themselves professionally, and that sort of led me to the health care profession in general, and then working at the drugstore I went from stocking shelves to helping my dad in the back in the prescription department when I was old enough. So that probably led me to that type of profession, and I was pretty decent in math, so math and science skills are good, and I preferred it over English or anything like that. It was a little bit artistic, but I just didn't just prefer that over history in English. Yeah, and you did say you went to Auburn, right? Yes, I went to high school in Birmingham, John Carroll High School, and then I went to Auburn straight out of high school, and back then the curriculum was five years and a year of internship. Now I think that it's more or closer to six years, and they come out with a doctor of pharmacy nowadays, but yes, I did go to Auburn University. And what was your major? It was pharmacy. What you do is it's very close to having a major in chemistry, but it is considered pharmacy. Yeah, we went to pre-pharmacy years and three professional, and yeah, your major is pharmacy, but if you want to look at it from a standpoint of before I got in there, you had to take a lot of chemistry and a lot of math. Yeah, and like looking towards a day in your job, what is it like? What's the hardships? What makes you keep going throughout the day? Okay, well, like I said, I had two different jobs. At UAB, it was a little bit different than working at the drug store. At UAB, you walk in very early in the morning about 6.30, go out to the nursing unit, see if they had any needs, go back to the pharmacy and take the beeper from the night shift, and I would get on the computer, very innovative at UAB. The computer would prioritize the now orders versus the stat orders versus an order that wasn't due to later on in the day, so I would go through those orders and see what the needs of the nursing units were at that time. I would also go through people's lab work to see if there needed to be any antibiotic changes, and I would call the doctors later on in life. There were nurse practitioners. You wouldn't have to call the doctor. You could go through the nurse practitioner, and I would adjust people's antibiotics based on their lab results. So we got to be a little bit more clinical, the more innovative UAB got down the road. Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, you're good. And at the drug store, a day in my life would be get here early before the customers get here. Because nowadays you have orders coming in over the phone, over the fax. People can call in all over the night through the night. As far as the drug store is concerned, we're innovative in multiple ways. My dad was the very first in the state of Alabama to have patient profiles before there were computers. He was one of the first ones to have, and you've seen it, Garrett, is our robot, which will, it carries the top 100 drugs, and not only does it count the medicine, it sticks it in a bottle and it labels it. And you've seen that, Garrett. It's pretty incredible to see that robot work, but we're also innovative in that we do compounds for not just humans, but for dogs and cats. So we have a following with veterinarians in the state. We do a lot of creams, we do a lot of female creams, hormonal creams for many of the physicians in town as well. Yeah. And I've been at this job for a little bit over eight months, and you really fall in love with it because of all of the different things that it incorporates and the people that you help and the people that you see. And you just don't understand how important it is until you're in it and how much you fall for it from the very beginning. Correct. And it's exciting because you have different you have different types of compounds. You know, you were, you were here during a very innovative time or a very unprecedented time when we had COVID. So that was the very first time we ever did curbside. Not only that, we compounded hand sanitizer. We have never done that. So that was very innovative. And of course, the School of Pharmacy, you found this out, they did this at Auburn as well. And the pharmacy students that came here, you learned from them and they learned from you during that time that you were here. Yeah, it's especially when I was in it. It's almost like you come in, you can't have, you have to have an open mind because of all the things that go on. It's every day is different. There's something new every day. And that's so interesting and why I fell in love with pharmacy from being there. Speaking of open minded Garrett, I'm glad you mentioned that because all I wanted to do was retail when I first got into that. But thank goodness for Auburn, they wanted us to see both sides. So they made us go to a drugstore for half the time. And they made us go to a hospital half the time. Yeah, I didn't realize how much I would like the hospital. So I ended up doing a rotation at a hospital in Montgomery. And I found out that I would rather do that for a while. So, so people need to know that there is hospital pharmacy. There is retail pharmacy. There is compound pharmacy. So there's different kinds. Back in the day, you could do drug route. You could also be a drug route being a pharmacist. They're a little bit few and far between now. Then you have radiologics. So you can do that as well. Keep an open mind. That would be my advice to a pharmacy student is to keep an open mind because there's different paths that you can go. So I heard you say that your advice to a pharmacy student would be that. But to the kids that are listening, what advice would you give them when they're deciding what they want to be or they're getting interested in pharmacy? What advice would you give them if they want to go into that field? Well, I would advise them to try to get on at a hospital or a drug store. Basically, like you did, you could be an assistant at the nursing unit and start out at what they call a patient care tech at a hospital. Start from the bottom up. That's what I did. I was stocking shelves just like you did. Of course, you did a little bit of everything and through a pandemic, you did a little bit more than a lot of people would have learned. But my advice to somebody wanting to start out is just if you can't get a job in the medical field, just get a job. Yes. Make sure from a professional standpoint, you give these people a two week notice because people look at this. But my recommendation would be definitely get a job. But the most important is when one opens in a medical field, try to do that. Even if you have to be an assistant to a unit clerk on a nursing unit where you run errands, you still get that knowledge base by watching. Yes. If you can get on at a drug store, even if you're a clerk, get that advice. I mean, get that experience if you can. Yeah. Because when I was there as a clerk, it wasn't just me stocking shelves. I was in the pharmacy. I learned all these different drug names. And in the future, I might have been a clerk, but I learned so much more than just stocking shelves. I learned about prescriptions, what the name of the drugs were, what they did. And it really just influenced me and helped way more than I thought it would. You'd be surprised, Garrett. I had a test question one time and I was just, you know, I had worked in my dad's drug store. The test question was, let's take, for instance, Spennergan tablets. Do they make them in any other form? Well, I knew from working in a drug store that they made them in suppositories, that it came in liquid. So you're right. Stocking those shelves, one of these days you're going to say, you know what, there is an item such as that. And I know that that's an antihistamine. I remember putting that in the cold set, cough and cold section. So down the road, having this experience is going to help you to answer some questions, you know, on a test one of these days. And you can say, you know what, I already know the answer to that because I've come across it. But you're absolutely right. Seeing from stocking shelves to being a clerk to work in the drive-through and being a pharmacy tech, you learned a lot. And you don't realize it until you get out in the real world. And one more thing, Garrett, I just wanted to tell everybody that I'm on the board of the Pharmacy Alumni Board for the School of Pharmacy at Auburn. Yes. And my brother and daddy are also Auburn graduates as well as me. And it's a very innovative pharmacy school down there. Yes. They're on the cutting edge. Most of our pharmacy schools are, but Auburn is pretty highly ranked. And if any of these students have any questions, they can walk into a pharmacy and talk to that pharmacist. They would be glad for you to shatter them. Yes. But from a standpoint of advice, get a job, try to get a job in the medical field, learn all you can, work from the bottom up, it helps. When you have to leave to go to college, give them a good two-week notice. It's a very professional thing to do. And soak it up like you did, Garrett. Yes. Any other questions? I think that's it. I just want to thank you for coming on. I know I appreciate it. And I know all these kids from Alabama 4-H are definitely going to appreciate the insight and advice that you've given them. Okay. And Garrett, one other thing I wanted to tell you is that no matter whether it's a drugstore or a hospital like UAB, I worked kidney transplant, heart transplant, children, infants. And it was very innovative. So it doesn't matter whether it's a drugstore or a hospital, they can all be very innovative. At UAB, kidney transplant was either number one or number two. It was either UAB or Pittsburgh. Some years Pittsburgh would do more than UAB. Some years UAB would do more than Pittsburgh. But it was fun working for two innovative places in my lifetime. I've been there and we hope to see you back here one day in this white pharmacy coat. Okay, Garrett. Y'all will.