Conlang

I finally got one of those "day of the week" pill organizers because I kept skipping doses for as many as several days in a row despite having Dosecast, mainly because:

1. The Dosecast app I use to track my pills doesn't consistently do its pop up notifications like it should, and there's no beeping or other sounds associated with its pop up notifications even when it is doing them.

2. The process of getting out all the bottles, getting the pills out of each bottle, piling the pills up in front of me, taking the pills, and putting everything away takes SO many spoons / energy slots that even when I was getting the notifications for the daily pills, I would get pre-emptive stress that depleted my energy and made me more prone to postponing it. Then it would be two or three days of skipping them because of my time blindness and I would get extremely annoyed with myself.

3. It doesn't help that doing all the activity every day to get that many pills ready depleted my energy enough that it made actually taking the pills harder to do. If you don't know what I mean: I have always had a problem with swallowing pills. I find most people's directions/instructions on how to do something new to be very confusing, to the point that I have to figure out how to do the thing myself pretty much all the time because of it. And when I was a kid, up into my teens, I was taking pills so infrequently - despite getting frequent migraines - that my poor ADHD memory and difficulty forming new habits meant that even when I was managing to figure out how to swallow pills, I was forgetting how to do it by the time I next had to do it. This lasted until a couple years ago, when I finally figured out and memorized how to take pills without gagging or choking. But the thing is, this takes concentration and focus to do. I have to mute anything with words in it to free up processing power for the task. And even though I know how to swallow all those pills at once, my having to go through a very difficult and stressful process of getting eight pills ready at once depletes enough system resources that if I tried swallowing all those pills at once, I would gag, choke, and possibly even puke. So to prevent that, I was having to take no more than three pills at once, and STILL had to concentrate very hard on doing it, because the smallest bit of mind wandering or split attention would make me gag on them.⁽¹⁾

Anyway, I finally bought a pill organizer, so I could skip the daily, energy-depleting, stressful process of getting the pills ready. I now only have to do that process once a week, and I can do it AFTER taking the pills. How is it going, you ask? Two days in a row, I popped open the pill box for the day, tossed all eight pills into my mouth, drank some iced tea (I can NOT dry-swallow pills), and swallowed all those fuckers all at once. I did still have to pause YouTube to be able to do it, but still, I did it!

I have never had any issues taking the Metformin on time unless it was at the same time as the others, since it's just two pills, so I didn't get one separated by day/night. Just the "once daily" version. (Hell, sometimes when I would skip most of the pills, I would still take the Metformin since it's a pretty important one.)

So that's a big relief. One less stressor in my life, two if you count my annoyance at myself from skipping taking the daily pills. Life got easier, and it only cost me like $4. (I had to get a big one because there are so many pills.)

(1) = This tendency to forget how to do things I've done before applies to pleasant things, too. It was only two or three months ago that I finally figured out how to properly roll a burrito, and it has taken all that time since to get mostly consistently good at it. I still sometimes fuck it up.