The one thing I hate about my stroke, among others is the amounts of medicine I now take daily. It has tripled the amount I used to take daily.Where my life used to revolve around the clock with just my husband's fifteen drugs and inhalants, now it's mine too on a almost opposite time schedule. It's an exercise in madness and goes 20 out of 24 hours. Try as I might, I just can't monitor him with his meds and take mine too.The greatest blessing is not having diabetes anymore. No more six times a day finger sticks for blood sugar tests and insulin injections. Wohoo! I been downgraded to once a day or as needed basis for the glucometer after a year's whole of normal A1C tests. I forgot to add my heart meds to the picture. That's three more pills I add during the day. Granted one of the pills shown is a gummy vitamin. Vitamins are a drug too.
I can remember being on a lot of new medicines after my heart attack, but this is ridiculous. Turns out I was allergic to half of them. A scary, painful way to discover new drugs allergies. This time, I was lucky. No newly discovered allergies, but some nasty side effects involving my defunct heart. It began a month long process of titrating down the offending drugs and titrating up on others to compensate.
In the hospital they were grinding up my meds and mixing them with pudding to be swallowed in the bite sized swallows. They tried to mix it with Jello once. I don't recommend this...bleck! Then came the time to try and swallow them whole...one pills to two sips of water even the tiny ones. This took a lot of time four times a day. Finally I'm up to three pills with one swallow after almost a year. That's progress!
Nothing is impossible with determination.
I can't imagine tracking two big stacks of pills as you do. I transfer the day's pills from a weekly container to a single container so I can place it in the place I will take my pills next. I put it next to my car keys if I am going to eat lunch out or on the cart I tranfer my meals to the table if I am eating in. But I don't think even this would help if I had to do what you are doing.
ReplyDeleteRebeeca I thought about one of those weekly pill boxes since I now take meds four times a day, but the compartments aren't big enough.
ReplyDeleteI just keep them in the pills bottles. In the mornings I'll pull out my morning and afternoon meds from the bottle and place the afternoon meds on my keyboard. I do the same thing with dinner time and bedtime meds.
Sounds like you've created a schedule that works!
ReplyDeleteSounds like hard work but at least you are keeping a positive attitude.
ReplyDeleteNick & Lara,
ReplyDeleteThe schedule is what it is out of necessity, but oh so tiring. I once called myself the master juggler and prided myself on logical progression strategies, now it's just survival.