Filling the Pill Boxes

A Saturday night chore at my house is the filling of the medication cases for the week.

Adored Wife and Social Hurricane both take quite a lot of maintenance medication.  SH is, I think, on about four different things--I don't fully keep up with hers.  She and AW have been handling it.

Adored Wife takes six different prescription medications on a regular basis, three of them four times a day, one thrice daily, two twice daily, and one once a day.  She also takes a daily multivitamin, twice daily calcium, and a daily aspirin, all at the recommendation of her doctors.  She ALSO has three other medications she takes on an "as needed" basis, depending on whether or not various symptoms flare up.  Those stay in the bathroom and don't go in the pill case.

Lots of people, of course, have chronic health conditions and set up medication on a regular basis--it's hardly unique to us.

But it's a satisfying little chore, and the pill cases are translucent--with all the various medications in their different shapes and colors in there and set up for the week they actually look quite pretty.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Prescription Snafus

Both Adored Wife and Social Hurricane take numerous regular prescriptions.  I take several herbal and natural supplements, Basement Artist has a prescription for an inhaler but rarely uses it (she takes over the counter stuff as needed), and Graphics Magician is currently on antibiotics for strep throat but otherwise takes medicine very infrequently.

But AW and SH need this stuff.  AW is on meds for seizure control, nerve pain, anxiety, blood pressure, and a couple of things I can't keep up with.  The Hurricane has prescriptions for stuff to control mood swings, depression, anxiety, and hallucinations.

Better living through chemistry.

So when we had a household snafu a few weeks ago and both ran out of certain medications for a day or two it was a bad day or two.  In Adored Wife's case she went about a day and a half without a prescription that helps manage nerve pain, and she spent a particularly unpleasant day until we were able to get it refilled.  Social Hurricane went a couple of days without the "mood swing" magic pills, and had a very difficult time of it.  It helped that she knew what was going on, but it wasn't easy for her.

Although, as Adored Wife puts it "at least we know the medicine works."  Yay, silver lining.

The problem was partly my letting a ball drop, partly a communications breakdown with a doctor's office, partly the Hurricane's inattentiveness, partly an unusually full week, and partly the unexpected Saturday closing of the drug store because they had a brief staffing crisis.  There were quite a few factors going on but I felt really bad about the part I played in it, because I wasn't the one having to pay for the mistake.

It's all good now and everybody's feeling much better and hopefully we won't let that happen again, but it's kind of sobering to realize how much we depend on modern medicine.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.