legends · 4 min read ·
Night Dispensary
A hospital night pharmacist is handed a prescription in his own name for a drug dated nine years from now.
I have worked the late shift at the hospital dispensary for six years and I can tell you what a night pharmacist actually does. We check. We check what the doctors have written, we check what the robot has picked, we check what the porter has signed for. Mostly we check each other's tiredness.
The prescription arrived through the hatch at 02:40 on a Tuesday, folded once, on the old paper form that nobody has used since the electronic system went in. No ward stamp. In the patient box someone had written a name and a date of birth. The date of birth was mine.
I assumed a joke. We have jokers. I turned it over. The drug was one I have never taken: a low-dose anticoagulant, a very ordinary one, taken daily by half the people over sixty. The dose was correct. The form of it was correct. The prescriber's signature was a scrawl and the registration number was real, and when I looked it up, belonged to a consultant who retired the year I qualified.
I did what I am trained to do. I did not dispense. I queried. I rang the wards. Nobody had sent a form. I rang medical records to ask if a patient of that name had been admitted, and the clerk on nights, a patient man named Dennis, said he had no such record, and then, after a pause long enough that I heard him eating a biscuit, he said, "There's a card for you in the file, though. Not a patient. It's a pharmacy card. Under your name."
I said what is on it.
"Allergies," he said. "None known. Then a line that says, 'Takes it with food.'"
I have never kept a card at this hospital. I thanked him, and I put the form in a drawer, and I went on with the rounds, the ordinary trolleys of ordinary medicines, the controlled drug book, the fridge log. At 04:15 the hatch opened again.
This time there was no form. There was a bag. A white dispensing bag, the clear-fronted sort, with a label on it, and in the bag a blister strip of the tablets, twenty-eight of them, two already pressed out. The label had my name, my address, and the instruction: *One to be taken each morning with food.* Beneath, in the small print we put there ourselves: *Dispensed by: night pharmacist.* And the date.
The date was nine years from now.
I should say what I did next, because it was the unprofessional thing and I am not proud of it. I did not report it. I put the bag in my locker and I locked the locker, and I told myself I would think about it in the morning. I thought about it all through the drive home. I thought about what a label like that is made of. We print them here, on a thermal printer, from a record. Someone, somewhere, in a future that has this dispensary in it, will put my name into a machine, and the machine will tell them what I take.
I have never had a clot. No one in my family has. But I am a pharmacist, and I know that nobody is handed a daily anticoagulant for the pleasure of it.
I went back the next night. The bag was where I had left it. I counted the tablets. There were twenty-six. Two more had been pressed out. The foil was torn the way I tear it, from the corner.
I do not remember taking them.
I have started to keep a diary on my phone. Breakfast, what I ate, the time I woke. It seems sensible. I notice that on the mornings the count goes down, I have always eaten properly, a boiled egg, toast, a coffee. On the mornings I skip food, the count stays where it is. As though whoever is handing out the tablets is polite enough to want me fed.
I have not told my doctor. What would I say? I do not want to be told that it is nothing. And I do not want to be told that it is something, either, because I think that the first one is a kindness and the second one is a date.
I have twenty-two tablets left. It is, I have worked out, a little under a month. I keep the bag in the locker now, behind the spare tabard, and some nights I take it out and read the label again. *Dispensed by: night pharmacist.* The signature box is blank. The pharmacist is supposed to sign it.
I have not signed it. I am being careful about that. I think that when I do, it will have been me all along.