One of the unsung heroes after the September flooding from Helene are pharmacists and their staff members.

When stores were closed and prescriptions needed filling, people turned to neighborhood drug stores, including in Morganton, a small city in western North Carolina about 50 miles east of Asheville.

They became a one-stop-medical-shop for many escaping the depths of destruction.

Personalizing health care at the Table Rock Pharmacy is why Jessi Stout got into the family drug store business with her husband Michael Stout in 2019.

“We were very new to independent pharmacy, retail pharmacy. It’s not like we worked for years in community pharmacy before taking over,” Stout said. “A lot of the first year was just kind of understanding that. How to run a business. How to manage employees. Then COVID-19 hit in 2020.”

Stout said they eventually found their footing by locally navigating the pandemic as a team. In order to financially stay afloat, she said they had to start offering some clinical services like vaccinations.

“Because, filling prescriptions alone, is a lot of times not profitable. So if you run a business, in pharmacy, just on filling prescriptions, (it) is not sustainable,” she said.

On top of maintaining a budget for payroll, expenses and ordering prescriptions for patients, the pharmacy faced a new challenge last fall: devastating floods in the region from Helene.

“When Helene hit that was a brand-new kind of disaster for us to experience. Really it was the first one since COVID,” Stout said.

The natural disaster created a loss of lives, homes and infrastructure.

With little time to adjust, and a staggering amount of health needs to meet, Stout said she and other independent pharmacists jumped into action.

“We’re a lot more nimble than chains and mail order,” Stout said.

Stout said the pharmacy only lost power for five or six hours the day of the storm, giving them the ability to fill prescriptions for people traveling from other pharmacies closed or destroyed by Helene.

“They would just bring in their pill bottle from their pharmacy and we would copy down their information then give them medicine in 5-10 minutes,” Stout said.

North Carolina law allows pharmacies to fill up to a 90-day supply of medication in the case of an emergency. 

“Trying to figure out how to help those that lost everything in the storm, even locally, and even those coming down the mountain that lost everything. Doctor’s offices were closed. Even here, for sometimes weeks,” Stout said.

She said small town medicine shined through a mission called Operation Streamline.

“Through this grassroots effort we were able to get together a ton of medicine for these doctors to take up the mountains for more (of) western North Carolina for them operating out of kind of makeshift clinics,” she said.

They collected everything from antibiotics to daily meds, epipens, triage kits and more. They used the Foothills Regional Airport as the makeshift headquarters for Operation Streamline.

“A lot of it was just learning by the seat of our pants,” Stout said.

In the end, Stout said overcoming power outages, finding ways to keep precious life-saving medicines from spoiling, and caring for the Greater Appalachian Community as part of a medical collective thrown together on-the-go, are proof of what locally owned drug stores are capable of if given the opportunity.

“It was cool to be able to see people coming together on the spot and on the fly for patients that had lost everything,” Stout said.

Stout said one pharmacist donated $20,000 worth of medicines for Operation Streamline out of Morganton. In the assessment of the Hurricane Helene recovery, the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management estimated a need of more than $6 million to help uninsured people access medications.

The Emergency Prescription Assistance Program was activated last October in response to the devastation created by Helene. The federal initiative launched to help people living in areas declared for disaster relief with medical needs who do not have health insurance.