Someone Has Been Filling My Prescriptions — I've Never Taken a Single One

I have a pretty ordinary medicine cabinet. Ibuprofen, some old antihistamines I keep meaning to throw out, a tube of bacitracin that's probably been in there since the Obama administration. I know what's in there the way you know the contents of a junk drawer — not because you've catalogued it, but because you've reached past the same things a hundred times.

So I don't have a good explanation for why I didn't notice it sooner.

The bottle is orange, standard pharmacy issue, the kind with the childproof cap that you have to push and turn at the same time. My name is on the label. My address — not my current address, but the apartment I lived in three years ago, before I moved. The prescribing physician is listed as a Dr. Harlan Foss. I have never heard that name in my life. I have never, to my knowledge, seen a doctor named Harlan Foss.

The medication is Clonazepam. Half a milligram, twice daily, for generalized anxiety disorder.

I don't have generalized anxiety disorder. I've never been diagnosed with it. I've never mentioned anything like it to any doctor I've actually seen. And yet the bottle is full — or nearly full, maybe forty-eight of the original sixty pills remaining — and the label says it was last filled at Whitmore Family Pharmacy on Decatur Street in November of 2022.

Whitmore Family Pharmacy closed in the spring of 2019. I remember when it closed because my mother used to pick up her blood pressure medication there and she was annoyed about finding somewhere new. The building is a vape shop now. I drove past it two weeks ago.

I want to be precise about what I found when I started pulling on this thread, because precision feels important. I looked up Dr. Harlan Foss. There is a Dr. Harlan Foss — or there was. He was a psychiatrist practicing in this city from roughly 1998 until he retired in 2017. His practice is listed on a few archived review sites as "permanently closed." One review, from 2016, describes him as thorough and attentive. Another says he had a good memory for his patients.

I have no memory of him.

I called the number listed on his old practice website anyway. It rang four times and went to a voicemail that said, in a measured, professional voice, that the office was no longer accepting new patients and that existing patients should contact their insurance provider for a referral. The voicemail did not say the practice was closed. It said no longer accepting new patients. I listened to it twice to make sure I'd heard it right.

Here's the part I've been sitting with for about two weeks now, the part I keep turning over and can't put down.

I went looking for gaps. That's the only word I have for it. I've been trying to account for the last four years of my life — decisions I made, things I stopped doing, changes in my behavior that I attributed at the time to just getting older or growing out of things. I stopped drinking coffee somewhere around 2021 and told myself I'd gotten sensitive to caffeine. I quit a job I'd had for six years in the spring of 2022 and told the people who asked that I'd wanted a change of pace, something lower-stress. I ended a relationship that same fall, and when my friends asked why, the best answer I could give was that I'd felt calmer without it.

Calmer.

Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine. It works on the central nervous system. At low doses, taken consistently, it smooths things out — that's the clinical language, more or less. It reduces the kind of arousal that makes you feel like things are urgent, like you need to push, like the stakes are high. Taken long enough, some people report that their whole relationship to risk changes. Things that used to feel important stop feeling that way.

I am not saying the pills caused me to make those decisions. I am not even saying I took the pills. Forty-eight out of sixty are still in the bottle. Twelve are gone, but I don't know when or how, and I can't rule out that the count on the label was never accurate to begin with.

What I'm saying is that I have a bottle of medication prescribed by a doctor I never saw, filled by a pharmacy that shouldn't have been open when it was filled, sitting in a medicine cabinet in an apartment I've lived in for three years — and the address on the label is from the place before this one, which means someone moved it when I moved, which means someone packed it.

I live alone. I've lived alone since 2021.

I called my insurance company and asked if they had any record of prescriptions under my name from a Dr. Harlan Foss. The woman on the phone put me on hold for a long time. When she came back, she said there was nothing in my file from that provider, but that records older than five years were sometimes archived separately and she'd have someone follow up.

That was eleven days ago. No one has followed up.

The bottle is still in my cabinet. I haven't thrown it out, and I've been trying to understand why. Part of it is that it feels like evidence of something I haven't named yet. Part of it is something harder to explain — a kind of reluctance I noticed when I reached for it the first time, a sense that I should leave it where it was.

I don't know if that feeling is mine.

I don't know, anymore, how to check.