I always worry a lot about illness and medication when I travel, because I take medication every day and need to keep taking it to stay alive. So before we left for the trip I arranged to get an extra supply of my meds -- I always travel with enough for the trip plus one week of travel delay.
It turns out that in Turkey, prescription medications are all available over the counter in any corner eczane (ej-zah-neh, or drugstore). And in tourist areas you will find rows of eczane with big ads for all those drugs they sell through spam. I wasn't in the market for male performance enhancers, but it was comforting to know that if I ran out of my usual prescriptions I could just buy them, usually for much less than the cost of the prescription in the US.
Unlike the mini-department stores we have in the US, drug stores in Turkey pretty much only sell actual drugs and beauty supplies. No notebooks, no pens, no candy. Like most places, the clerks could usually do some very simple commercial English and understand the names of drugs, with one exception, which is that in Turkey, as in every other place in the world except America, acetaminophen is called paracetamol.
You can often buy small packets of tissues (and bottles of water, and other items) on the street. The people who sell them (for 0.50TL or 1TL or so) are basically beggars. Begging is illegal, and in theory so is vending without a license, but the police will turn a blind eye to that for the most part. For the most part the money they make that way is their sole support, so we bought the occasional bottle of water that way.
The word for hospital in Turkish is "hastanesi," the emergency room is "acil servis." I hope you don't need those. However, since hospitals are often indicated on maps, whereas just about nothing else including many roads is guaranteed to be, knowing the words can be an important wayfinding device.
