That awful moment where you lift the new bottle, and the sound of the tablets shifting says “this is the wrong brand.”

The manufacturer discontinued the formulation of metoprolol ER I’ve taken for years, and I found that the first replacement brand I tried, the one my local pharmacy usually stocks, didn’t agree with me. 

The last time I talked to them about it, they’d ordered a second for me to try, and I think where we’d left it was that I was going to call back if it didn’t work so I could try the one other formulation available. The second one did work, and because they gave me that one three months running, I wrongly presumed that they’d continue. Because of course there’s more than one person there, I should have called back to confirm and set that one in stone. That was my mistake, not theirs.

I don’t know if it’s against the law everywhere – I can certainly imagine why it would be – but in the U.S. state where I live, it’s against the law for pharmacies to take a bottle of pills back when this happens. You have to check and catch it *before* they turn it over to whoever is picking it up. And if you don’t and you want it replaced, you have to pay out of pocket to replace it if you want it before the date your insurance will pay for another refill.

I called them and asked them to please order a bottle of “second formulation” to replace it with and to mark in my script for it to fill it with that brand going forward. The tech said “Uh, there are no more characters left in this little box,” the one where they’ve noted all my other brand specifications. She had to find another spot in the record where it’d fit. 

I don’t know if I still do, but for a long time I had My Very Own Shelf at the pharmacy for this reason, and if it’s still there, Second Formulation will get to slide in with all the others and say, “You too?” 

Anyway, write today off, between the stress of fixing this on the phone and my body’s unhappiness with being thrown off balance.