I was sitting in my own car in the clinic parking lot, holding a prescription for the thing that was making me sick. And I already knew. I knew before I even turned the key.

He’d patted my chart. That’s the part I keep coming back to. This kid, maybe thirty-two, leaned back in his chair and gave my folder two little pats like you’d pat a dog, and told me the dizziness was “very common anxiety at your age.” He said “at your age” three times in eleven minutes. I counted. Counting is what I do. Thirty-eight years counting pills into trays does that to a person.

Let me back up a second. I worked behind a pharmacy counter from the time I was twenty-four until I was sixty-two. Same little drugstore most of those years. I filled scripts for four decades of doctors, the good ones and the lazy ones, and I caught their mistakes more times than I can tell you. A wrong dose here. A bad combo there. I’d pick up the phone, real polite, and say, “Hey, Dr. So-and-so, did you mean to start her on this with the warfarin?” And nine times out of ten there’d be a pause, and then, “Good catch, Diane.” That was my whole life. Being the last person standing between somebody and a very bad day.

So nobody had to explain dizziness to me.

It started about three weeks after the antibiotic. Room would tilt when I stood up. My heart did this little flutter-skip thing, like it tripped over itself. I told myself it was nothing. I want to be honest here, because I wasn’t some perfect patient. I ignored it for ten days.

I’m seventy-one, I figured maybe I was just slowing down, maybe this is what slowing down feels like. I almost didn’t even go in.

But the flutter scared me. So I went.

And I got the kid. Dr. Ellison. Nice enough hair, firm handshake, didn’t sit down. He asked me three questions and answered all of them himself. When I tried to mention my heart medication, the one Dr. Patel put me on for the rhythm thing, he sort of nodded over me and kept typing. “A lot of women your age feel this way,” he said. “It’s stress. It’s hormonal. It’s normal.”

Here’s the thing. I knew the second he opened his mouth. Because a month earlier, that same young man had prescribed me an antibiotic for a sinus infection. And that antibiotic does not mix with my heart pill. It just doesn’t. The two of them together stretch out the heart’s timing, and that’s where the dizziness comes from, and the flutter, and worse if you wait long enough. It’s not some obscure footnote. It’s in the boxed warning. Bold print. The first thing you’d ever learn about that drug.

He prescribed both. A month apart. And then he looked me in the face and told me it was my age.