Remembering to take your meds

Many of us have medications, plus vitamins, plus supplements to take.  Sometimes they can't be taken together because of interactions.  Sometimes they have to be rather precisely taken or we get thrown "off" - that unpleasant time when we stiffen up, can barely move, have terrible tremors, and such.

I recently started Levodopa - and have learned the hard way what happens when I forget to take my meds.  I am supposed to take them an hour before a meal, or  to wait two hours after the meal.  Before, I never quite got the difference between "on" (when the meds work, bless 'em) and "off" (when the meds don't work any more, darn it).  I stiffen up and lose my ability to write or type without frequent and frustrating errors.  Before I started the meds, I had to just live with it, but life is SOOOO much easier "on."

(And separating Levodopa from meals really is important, since protein vies with Levodopa for the same receptors.  When I first tried Levodopa it didn't work - because I took it with my protein smoothie!)

So taking the meds at the right time is important.  But how the heck do you remember to take them?  I tried using the calendar function on my smartphone, which I can set for the exact time, and has an alarm - and even buzzes on my Apple Watch, handy when I'm not near my phone.

Except the alarm would go off, I'd turn off the alarm then get distracted...  and forget all about the pill.

This happened every. single. day.  So I needed a solution.  I tried several apps.  Dosecast didn't work after the first dose, offering the third dose with no way to access the second dose. Had to remove it from my phone.  Medisafe insisted I needed a password, and that the password must include an upper case letter (among many other requirements); but then wouldn't let me capitalize the letter when logging in, so I could never even try it.  Had to remove that from my phone, too.  (Appleworld problem - not as many apps and not as well reviewed.)

Right now, I'm trying Round Health.  No login unless I want it, easy to enter the meds I want to take, and when.  This has a window of half an hour around each dose - 1/4 hour before dose is due there's a message to the phone; at time does is due - alarm on watch; 5 minutes late - another alarm on watch.  This keeps up until you tell the app you took the pill or 1/4 hour after the pill was due.   You can click on your Apple Watch that you took the pill, or you can click on the phone; either way, it keeps track of when you actually took the pill.  You can also shift everything forward x time just for one day - think of manually shifting all those alarms just because you woke up late; I can really see using this particular feature.  Round Health has other features, but I'm not using them at the moment so not going to talk about them here.

Fingers crossed this is the one.

Images from Pixabay and Twitter.