The Rules and Regulations to Rituals and Reminders.

When I get up in the morning, once I’ve managed to drag my ass out of bed (NOoooooo sleep is my favorite hobby), this is what I have for breakfast. 8 pills and enough juice to wash ’em down.

one pill makes you larger....
Delicious.

And then once I get to work, I have Second Breakfast!

"These are gonna make you hyper. Hyper hyper hyper."
Delicious and nutritious
Like some demented hobbit on a day pass.

George Carlin wrote in one of his books, “The sicker you get, the harder it is to remember if you took your medicine.” I’m finding it’s truer (more true? Truthier?) than I figured when I first read it. With the sixteen pills I take a day come rituals and reminders. You can’t just take some meds and be done with it. They all have their own rules and regulations and side effects. I have to take Riluzole on an empty stomach, it is very specific: “One hour before or two hours after eating”. And then prednisone has to be taken with food. I have to take them both in the morning, so I have to create a behavior that takes those rules into consideration. I take the Riluzole along with everything else in the morning (so it’s not technically an empty stomach, sure, but pills aren’t food, even if the dinosaur multi and the vitamin C ARE chewable). It takes me about an hour to get to work, so by the time I get in, I can take the prednisone. So I have something to eat and then swallow a couple pills. I have a reminder set at 2PM to take my second dose of gabapentin. And then another at 4:30 to take the other Riluzole, so that an hour’s gone by when I get home and start thinking about dinner. When I get home, another three pills wait for me – the second daily dose of buproprion and ranitidine, and the magnesium supplement. At ten PM, another alarm goes off on my phone and I take the day’s final gabapentin.

Six appointments a day. For medicine.

Thank the merciful LORD ABOVE for technology. I don’t know how people did this before phone alerts. I’ve forgotten to brush my teeth some mornings, how the hell am I supposed to be able to remember at what times to take what? So I rely on my phone’s alarm function and one of those stupid little day-of-the-week pill boxes with night and day dose rows. Once a week, I tip the right pills in the right boxes, and then just empty the right one into my hand when I head downstairs to work and swallow them before I leave. And then there’s three bottles of pills in my drawer at work, to be accessed at the right time. I have pills EVERYWHERE. And I should have a small stash of those three pills in my bag, in case I go somewhere on a weekend. Again, a George Carlin quote. “Now you’ve got shit all over the WORRRRLD!”

The sicker I get, the more pills I’m going to have to take.

The sicker I get, the harder it is going to be to remember if I took my medicine.

It’s an obstacle I’ll overcome when I get to it. I’ll have to. At least my phone isn’t affected by all of this – the sicker I get, my phone don’t GIVE a shit – so as long as that works, I’m set. …As long as I remember to take it with me. These rituals and reminders are part of my life now, and that’s okay. It’s not bad, just different. Just one more habit I have to form, one more shift in my lifestyle. And someday I might have a feeding tube, so I won’t even have to swallow the little fuckers. Just bloop bloop bloop, in they go.

As long as I remember to have my phone, to remind me take them.