Do you ever wonder what happens to strangers you see regularly who just… disappear?

I work in a pharmacy in a supermarket. When I used to work just in the supermarket part people would stop coming and I’d wonder but never get answers. But now working in the pharmacy, it’s rare we don’t know why they stopped. It’s just part of the job that we know most of our patients better. Those with monthly repeats we see every month. We see their names over and again when we order their prescriptions, dispense them, file them ready for pick up, and every time we flick through the filing looking for a name starting with the same letter. Those names sear into our brains, so we also know most of them by sight. We also tend to be people they open up to, because health is a sensitive matter and they’re used to talking to us about that. So big changes in their lives they usually tell us. If they’ve moving away they will tell us. When they just stop coming without us being told, it’s not long before one of us says ‘what happened to so-and-so. If the others don’t know we can have a look at our computer record of them (this isn’t just for nosiness, but we may have outstanding medication that has been sitting around, have an item we regularly order for them etc, so we do need to know if they aren’t coming back). If they’ve been nominated to a different pharmacy, it tells us so we know they just went somewhere else. It may also tell us that their address has changed to that of a prison, so we know if they’ve been incarcerated (have seen it a couple of times) and it will also be marked if they are deceased. Quite often if they are deceased we know before checking though. Sometimes we have been supplying what we call end-of-life medication (the stuff they only put people on if they’re dying to make them comfortable) to them for a while. Quite often a family member or spouse will have brought back all the leftover medication they no longer have need of for disposal and will tell us (if they are also one of our patients we sometimes keep a close eye when they next come in to make sure they are mentally recovering well). One patient recently knew he had under a month left and gave us a card and some chocolates for all our help. It’s a sad aspect to the job, but also nice in a way. Part of the human connection, even though we may not be close to these people, we are just a service they use, we share a moment of sadness among ourselves for their loss.