Post No. 3 for The Medical Project

Hi! Swatibee is back today with her third post for The Medical Project. Feel free to catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 before reading!

Hello again all. As I’m still binderless, but progress is being made so that’s hopeful. I mailed the Temperley to them and tracked (stalked) it across the border from Canada to the USA, until it arrived and a couple days after that I got an email saying that the good folks at Filofax agreed that the rings are beyond repair. In addition to stalking my package I’d also been stalking the website and it said they were sold out of the compact size, but somehow the lovely man I emailed with said he could still send me one. So now I’m waiting on the arrival of my new binder.

So without a binder to talk about I thought I’d take this post as an opportunity to talk some about some non-emergency medical stuff. There’s been conversations about getting sick and forgetting meds and thus getting sicker, as well as missing symptom changes because of not keeping track. I can’t forget about my meds because terrible things would happen to my health if I did. Occasionally I do end up having to stay up later because I’m running late taking them though and that’s annoying when I’m tired.

The way I stay on top of my meds has been by adding daily pages. I previously used a WO2P (week on two pages) and stuck with that for years until I found WO1P+notes (week on one page plus notes on facing page) and I still adore that format. But love or not I needed more space, at first I printed small half-ish size pages and inserted them in for each day just ripping them out and recycling them at the end of any given day. But soon the printing and cutting and hole punching seemed like too much work, plus the printer paper was quite thick compared to usual FF paper and was taking up valuable ring space. So I ordered a custom stamp.

I’m just using the self-inking stuff that came with the stamp as the plan was LESS work not fussing with fancy inks and such. I’ve found that the cotton cream paper handles the ink a bit better. I added daily mini size pages to put the stamps on and for various other notes as well. I have a weeks worth of dailies in between the spread of my WO1P+notes.

This set up lets me flip from week to week easily adding appointments and such to my weeklies. I only fill in the dailies one week at a time (though I do stamp them farther in advance) and only carry a few weeks worth at a time to save on bulk in my planner. I live out of a pocket FF so every bit of ring space is precious.

My meds are complicated and have to be timed carefully to keep various types of meds separate from each other. I’m pretty sure keeping up with my schedule is only possible because of my general obsessiveness and my lists. I ALWAYS know if I’ve taken my meds because of my checklists as well as my daily meds container.

This holds my meds for one day (filled in advance) and lets me double check that I’ve taken everything I should as the day goes on.

The other main tool I use is a general symptom tracking page.

I didn’t want to fuss with changing the file and printing it special for each week so I made a file that just reads “Mon” “Tue” and so forth and I handwrite in the dates when I use it. (Conveniently this also lets me photocopy a bunch at once.) I have various things I want to track down the short side (which is hole punched to fit into my pocket FF and it folds accordion style (like the fold out year planners from FF) and the days of the week along the long top side (which is hole punched to fit into an A5 FF which is what I use to archive medical things). This lets me see how much sleep I’m getting, pain levels, dizziness, nausea and so forth (I only put some of it here). This basic format could be used for whatever symptoms were most important for someone, or to see if there was a correlation between symptoms and sleep or any other thing tracked.

I’ll be back again when my binder is here 🙂