The bag under the sink

Rowena Blythe brought in a carrier bag. It contained fourteen medicines, six of which had been discontinued between two and seven years earlier.

Nothing here is about taking fewer medicines as a goal in itself. It is about the list matching the intention, which is a different and duller objective.

A year of fewer things

The two weeks after a discharge are, statistically, when things come apart: doubled doses, discontinued drugs still being taken, side effects nobody warned about.

What’s in the cupboard is the real prescription. The record is an aspiration.

Samuel Reyes, clinical pharmacy

What the call found

Roughly one in six calls finds a duplication — the same drug arriving under two names from two prescribers who were each entirely correct.

“I kept them in case,” she says. “In case of what, I could not tell you.”