Taking medications as prescribed is very important but can be challenging, especially when traveling. I’ve written a separate post on making sure you will have enough medicine on hand for your trip. In this post I am tackling making sure you take your pills on time. If you take one or two medications, you may wonder why I am writing this post, I probably would to, so please feel free to quit reading now.

I take 25 pills or half-pills every day that get spread out over 7 separate pill times per day. Juggling this at home with poor short term memory (I can’t even remember what I ate for breakfast) is challenging enough. One day’s medicine taking blurs with the other days’ medication taking.  Each day I take: 2 pills when I first wake up, which should be 1 hour before breakfast, 1 pill 30 minutes after that which should be 30 minutes before breakfast, 7 pills with breakfast, 2 pills in the early afternoon, 1 pill an hour before dinner, 7 pills with dinner, and 5 pills at bedtime.

Karla’s daily medicine, each row is a separate medication time

I have pills I take once, twice or three times per day. So how did I come up with my schedule and how do I make sure I am following it?  Each time I get a new medicine, I find out how often I need to take it and if there are any special instructions such as with food, a certain amount of time before food, at bedtime, etc.  If the pills are twice a day I spread them out in the morning and evening, three times a day I split morning, early afternoon and evening, etc. Your schedule needs to include any special instructions from your doctor or pharmacist. Note: if you are having problems with a special instruction, speak to your doctor for resolution. For example, my Cellcept comes with directions of do not take with food. I tried this and had problems with nausea and vomiting. I spoke to my doctor who said I could take it with food, as it was more important that I could take the medication and keep it down, than not.

In order to keep track of whether or not I take each medicine each day, I utilize weekly pill holders which I refill from my bottles about once per week.

Weekly pill organizers

My breakfast meds go in the green “AM” labelled organizer, dinner meds in the purple “PM” meds organizer; both my before breakfast and early afternoon medications I put in the one called “early and lunch” and “hs” stands for hour of sleep, i.e. bedtime. You can adapt the number of these to meet your needs.

I keep one bottle of each current medication in this plastic holder to fill the weekly containers

The plastic container works great to keep all of the medications together, especially in the RV cabinet.  The extra bottles (from picking up 90 day supplies) I store in a separate container.

Every morning at breakfast, I place that day’s pills into two smaller holders:

I use two of these daily, this one is holding dinner (top) and early afternoon (bottom) medications.  After taking early afternoon, I move over the pill I take 1 hour before dinner into the empty side. The other container holds my bedtime and the two before breakfast doses for the following day. After I take the bedtime dose, I separate the two before breakfast doses into one dose per side.

I always know at a glance if I have taken my pills or not because if I have not taken them they will still be in the container. This may seem like a lot of effort, but by doing it every day it becomes routine and doesn’t take up much time.

I use a combination of situational and electronic alarms to take my pills at the right times throughout the day. I take my first dose as soon as I wake up and then about 30 minutes later- I use a 30 minute timer on my phone. After my second dose I need to wait 30 more minutes to eat, so I reset the 30 minute timer. At breakfast, I take my breakfast medications. I set two daily alarms on my iphone for 2:30pm and 5:30pm, for the afternoon and the 1 hour before dinner medications. I take my dinner pills at dinner.  I take my bedtime pills right before I go to bed.

When we are traveling or getting together with other people, I encounter the most challenges with getting the medications that are supposed to be 1 hour or 30 minutes before meals. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen a nice restaurant that Mike would like to try for dinner right then and there and I haven’t taken the one hour before medication. I try to take them the full hour ahead, but if I take them immediately before we go in and get seated somewhere, it’s not the end of the world. So remembering that it is a schedule, but it can be slightly manipulated will allow you to be more flexible.

I almost always have water with me in the jeep. I carry a small nalgene bottle that fits in the cup holder. We usually have hiking nalgenes or other bottles of water for emergencies in the back of the jeep while traveling. One of the main reasons I take along water every day is that dry mouth is a side effect of my medication. But it also means I have water available to take medications.

All of the planning and alarms are great, but realistically, there are times I’ve been in the middle of something and realize later I shut off the alarm but never took the pills, didn’t take them along in my purse because I was supposed to be back sooner, or forgot to get them out at dinner (more of a problem eating out as I keep the container on the table at home/in RV).  When I realize I’ve missed a dose, I think about what the medication is.  Some I can just take later at the time I realize it, some I can’t. This is something I work out with my doctors. I go through the list and ask about what to do if I realize I missed a dose.

During my working career, I worked in group homes with adults with developmental disabilities and in brain injury rehabilitation programs, both of which involved making sure clients got their medications on time. From my time there, we learned that there was a two hour window within which you can take almost all medications before needing to check with anyone, i.e. a 5pm medication can be taken any time from 4pm-6pm.  We also recorded on a medication record, each dose administered.  If you don’t want to use weekly containers, but find yourself struggling to remember if you took pills, you could create some type of form for yourself that you record on after each dose.  I prefer the containers because the pills are either there or there not, a log requires me to remember and take the time to mark it each dose.

Getting medications on time is important, but can be made easier by using some systems. The more consistent you are with a system the easier it is to use and the less reliant you are on your memory and awareness of time of day. If you don’t have a phone with alarms, other people use watch alarms or even an alarm clock.