"I'm not on any medications." He was on a blood thinner.

Before I extract teeth, I ask every patient the same questions. Any medications? Any blood thinners? This particular patient — elderly, sharp enough to hold a full conversation — answered without hesitation. No medications. Definitely no blood thinners. The only thing he could recall was something for his blood pressure.

We took consent. We proceeded. Six extractions, upper right side, second molar through to the front central incisor.

Six hours later, my nurse called. He'd come back to the clinic. His shirt was soaked through with blood.

We packed every extraction site again, re-sutured, got the bleeding under control. He was calm about it — more puzzled than alarmed. When we asked, again, whether he was on any blood thinners, he genuinely didn't know how to answer. He knew he took "some tablets." He didn't know what they were for. He offered to have someone walk to his home to photograph the boxes, since he lives close by.

While we were waiting for that photo, we also tried the obvious thing — logging into his HealthHub profile, where medications prescribed within the public healthcare system are supposed to be visible. Nothing came up. It turned out he sees private clinics for most of his care, and private prescriptions don't automatically flow into that record. As far as any system we had access to was concerned, he wasn't on anything at all. The only source of truth that actually existed was sitting in a bag on his kitchen counter, and the only way to reach it was to walk over and photograph it ourselves.

One of the medications in that photo was Clopidogrel — Plavix. A blood thinner. The exact thing we'd asked him about twice before touching a single tooth.

That's the part that stayed with me longer than the bleeding did. We have a national platform built for exactly this problem, and it still couldn't answer the one question that mattered, because the record only knows what it's told, and private care never told it anything.

He wasn't lying to us. He wasn't hiding anything. He simply didn't know. And I don't think he's unusual — I think he's representative of a huge number of elderly patients who are handed a bag of medications, told what to take and when, and never really told what any of it is or does. They know the color of the pill. They know it's "for the pressure." They don't know its name, its class, or what it interacts with.