They Took Their Medicine and Died

Cedar Valley News — March 21, 2026
They Took Their Medicine and Died
By: Dr. Aisha Khalid
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

She sat in my exam room with her daughter beside her. She was seventy-four. She had fallen twice in a month. She could not sleep. Her daughter was afraid it was dementia. The woman was afraid her daughter was right.

I opened her medication list. Eleven prescriptions. Four doctors. I went through every one. Three of the eleven were treating side effects of the other eight. We removed those three. Within two weeks she was sleeping through the night. Within a month the falls stopped. She did not have dementia. She had too many pills.

She is alive. She is someone you might know.

But not everyone gets what she got. Not everyone has a daughter who brings her in. I want to tell you about people who were not so fortunate. These are not fictional characters. These are real people, documented by the World Health Organization and by public record. Read their names.

Naila was an older woman on a long list of medications. Her daughter sat down with the doctor and went through every pill. Does my mother still have this condition? No. This one? No. Drug after drug came off the list until one was left. When her daughter asked why she kept taking all of them, Naila said she kept taking them because the doctor kept prescribing them. Nobody asked.

Martha was twenty-two. A psychiatrist wrote a warning in her chart about low potassium. A junior doctor ignored it and prescribed lithium. A cardiologist confirmed a heart defect, but never read the results. Martha died of a cardiac arrhythmia caused by the drug. Her family gave permission for her story to be published so others might be spared. She was on one medication. One.

Timothy “Woody” Witczak was thirty-seven. He lived in Minneapolis. He was not depressed. He had no history of depression. He went to his doctor because he could not sleep. The doctor gave him a sample pack of Zoloft. Five weeks later Woody was dead. His wife Kim has spent twenty-three years fighting for drug safety. On Tuesday she will be in Washington for National Adverse Drug Event Awareness Day. She is still fighting.

I sit with these stories the way I sit with my patients. Quietly. I have been a physician long enough to know the difference between a disease walking through my door and a prescription walking through my door. Some days, the hardest part of my job is not writing a prescription. It is looking at the ones already written and finding the courage to cross one off.

I know a man in his nineties who never took a pill in his life. Last year he got shingles. The pain was unbearable. He accepted one medication. It caused his body to hold water. So, his doctor prescribed a second pill to fix what the first one caused. As soon as he could, he stopped both. He lives with pain in his head every day. He would rather have the pain than start the chain again. Not everyone has the stubbornness to do what he did. Most people trust the next prescription the way Naila trusted hers.

Tuesday is National Adverse Drug Event Awareness Day. You have probably never heard of it. An estimated 250,000 Americans die every year from adverse drug events. Nearly half were preventable.

I am asking you to do something before the week is over. If you are taking even one prescription, bring it to your next doctor visit and ask: ” Do I still need this? Is this the right dose for my body today?” And if something does not feel right—if you are dizzy, if you are falling, if you cannot sleep—do not accept a new prescription until someone has looked at the old ones. Bring someone who loves you enough to ask the hard question. And if the answer does not satisfy you, ask another doctor.

My name is Aisha. It means alive. I write it in my notebook some nights when the day has been long, to remind myself why I do this work. Not to prescribe. To heal. And sometimes healing means picking up the list, reading every line, and putting down the pen.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

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