Medication regimens can be extremely complex. Sometimes medicines need to be taken at a certain time, a certain time period before eating, after eating, with food, without, and so on. Keeping a handle on all these different requirements was something that people developed different strategies for because frankly, it’s confusing! One person I talked to said they use the alarms function on their phone. “They’re all over the map too in terms of timing and stuff. I have alarms set off on our phones for morning pill, afternoon pills, and then evening pill and nighttime pills. We have alarms going off on our phones.”
Phone alarms and reminders can help in juggling all the different aspects of medication routines. “We have five alarms set on our phones, all throughout the day, the first one being 8:30 to remind both him and me that he takes his medications. We make sure that he takes his meds because he had been skipping days unintentionally before, and that’s not good. That’s 8:30. Then there’s an 8:35 alarm for his Exelon Patch. He goes and gets the what we call the patch set up, which is cotton swabs, alcohol to clean the glue off, the patches and a pair of scissors to cut the patch. We do that. The patch has to be rotated from shoulder to shoulder.”