I Asked a Pharmacist if Stopping My Opioids Cold Was Life-Threatening. He Said Yes.

I had never spoken to this man before. That turns out to matter.

I called my pharmacy on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of September. The pharmacist who picked up was covering. He did not know me, had never filled anything for me, had no relationship with me at all, and had nothing whatsoever to gain by agreeing with me.

I told him what I was on. I told him it had been stopped. He could see the history on his screen while we talked.

Then I asked him the question I had been carrying around for days, the one I was half afraid to say out loud in case the answer was that I was being dramatic.

I said: this is life-threatening, isn't it?

He said: yeah, I definitely see it.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make more of that exchange than it was. He was not writing a report. He was a man on a Sunday shift looking at a screen and answering a stranger honestly. Later in the same call he used the word negligence, and he told me I needed pain therapy.

But here is why it landed the way it did. Everything before that moment was mine. My pain, my account, my memory, my reading of what had happened to me. Anyone can wave that away, and people do, constantly, to patients in exactly this position. You get very used to being the only witness to your own life.

And then a professional with no stake in it looked at the same information and said the same thing back to me in about four seconds.

I had been treating my own alarm as a symptom. It turned out to be an assessment.

If you are somewhere in this and you are not sure whether what you are feeling is proportionate, that is my one piece of practical advice. Call your pharmacy. Ask them plainly, with your history in front of them. They can see the whole record — every prescriber, every fill, every date — in a way that no single doctor's office can. They are not gatekeeping your dose and they have no reason to manage you.

Ask an open question and then stop talking. Do not lead them. You do not want the answer you are hoping for. You want the one they would have given anyway.

Write down what they say, the same day, in their words rather than yours.

I recorded my call. Texas permits that when you are a party to it. I did not do it to build a case. I did it because I was not sure I would remember the conversation clearly, and by then I had stopped trusting myself to hold on to things.

It is the most useful thing I own.