The half-empty packet

There's a packet of blood pressure tablets in the kitchen drawer. It was a month's supply and it was dispensed in March. You took them every morning for the first fortnight, then you had a weekend away and forgot, and the fortnight after that they were most mornings, and now they're a thing you notice when you're looking for the batteries. You felt nothing when you started them and you feel nothing now. There's a check-up you've been meaning to book, and part of the reason you haven't is that you'd have to explain the packet.

Somewhere else in the house there's a preventer inhaler that only gets used when your chest is tight, which the leaflet says is not what it's for. There's an antidepressant that you've been halving for six weeks because you feel so much better, and you haven't mentioned it at the surgery. There's a strip of antibiotics with three left, from a chest infection that cleared on day four. There's a thyroid tablet that's taken at seven some mornings and at eleven on others and not at all when the morning gets away from you.

These are invented, but I'd guess at least one of them is close. Some words. The quiet stop is stopping a medicine without telling the person who prescribed it. The fade is the slower version, from every day to most days to when you remember. The feeling-fine test is deciding whether to take a medicine by how you feel, which is the habit's engine and the thing this book takes apart. The silent ones are medicines for conditions with no symptoms, so you feel the same with or without them until something serious happens. The holding ones are medicines that hold a condition down while you take them, so feeling fine is what taking them looks like. The short ones are courses with a planned end. The conversation is the talk with the prescriber or a pharmacist that any change should start from. The hook is the fixed daily event a dose is tied to. And the leaflet is the folded paper in the box, which turns out to answer most of the questions in this book.

Before you go on, do one thing. Find every medicine you've been prescribed and count what's left against the date it was dispensed. Don't take anything, don't throw anything away, and don't feel anything about it yet. Just write down the gap between what should be gone and what is. That number is the subject of this book, and it's more common than the drawer makes it feel.