okay damn it how do i remember to take my meds?

[hunter]

11. If I forget my asthma meds I can't breathe. So I've got some incentive to remember all my meds.

Or so at least a reasonable person might imagine... sigh.

You wouldn't have wanted to know me when I was young and foolish and believed I could simply power my way through both the asthma and the crazy. Strong will, mind-over-matter, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, all that kind of nonsense. I wanted to believe.

Nope. Didn't work. They knew me in the hospital emergency rooms.

But it was the asthma that forced my hand, got me in the habit of remembering to take my meds. A friend's brother died from an asthma attack, in his early twenties as I was then, and maybe that scared me. Possibly not. Maybe I just outgrew those adolescent and young adult feelings of invincibility.

Taking meds reliably is practice, like any other thing. I take meds in the morning, late afternoon, and before I go to bed. Even when I'm busy or otherwise distracted there seems to be a built-in timer that goes of in my head. Time to take my meds.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like not to have to take meds regularly, but that's never been my situation. My dad's sister died as a child of respiratory problems, before antibiotics and decent asthma medications, and other family members were mentally ill and dysfunctional in ordinary society, so either of those probably would have been my fate without modern medicine.

Best wishes to you, and the smart phone idea is probably a good one, especially the part about not turning off the alarm until you've taken your meds, or at least using the ten minute "snooze" function.