I too don't eat breakfast. I bring a round plastic container with all of my meds and vitamins with me to take after I eat lunch. I feel them in my scrub top and reminders me to take them. This has been working out well for some time now. In the morning I drink 2-3 cups of coffee and drink 16 oz of water mixed with metamucil so my tummy is full until lunch.
bizi

Dear Bizi,
After I leave home, I do not have even have two seconds to myself until very late in the afternoon when I eat the breakfast/lunch (lately it is quinoa I prepared the night before with some Chobani yogurt. I have to excuse myself just to go to the restroom. I do drink water throughout the day.

I could take double vitamins on the days I am home like I am today. I would learn to coordinate eating with taking the vitamins.

Hey. Maybe I have a solution.
I cannot keep my vits and meds in the same container. Ever since I started on meds, I keep the prescribed stuff separate from the stuff I buy at the health food store.
Also, I make a mini ritual of my night meds by laying each one out in order by color, counting, taking a second or third look and taking them in order they were laid out.
That is why I currently am not taking vitamins. I want to be certain that I take my meds correctly.

If I keep the vitamins in a separate room, that might help. They will have their own separate place and time, and their own sort of ritual.

M

you could take your vitamins after lunch, in your office or in the bathroom?????
sorry you have so much to juggle at work and sounds like not enough privacy.
bizi

Dear Mari

thanks for your post, i will still try to be more brief. i do have genuine difficulty with verbosity, which can certainly add to problem if one feels overwhelmed by a topic.
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i am so sorry work places such constant demands on your time/attention. that environment seems terribly stressful. i truly don't know how you can handle it.
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Vit timing:

first, it should be fine to take 2 of those multivits at the same time, i.e. only once a day hassle. you are right about taking them with food.

i think with your br/unch would be ideal because i've read of certain b vits increasing alertness, and others, if taken before bed, increasing vividness of dreams. alertness would be helpful during the day. i know the dream thing is undesirable for you.

the other alternative is with dinner, as long as several hours elapse between your dinner time and going-to-bed time. that is when i take mine because lunch is haphazard. i have dinner at 7pm ish, and go to bed anywhere between 11pm and 5 am. with this sort of distancing, i have not seen any correlation between taking/not taking the vits and my falling asleep, staying asleep, or dream quality.

taking them with dinner would allow you to keep them at home - in a separate room as you suggested, to provide the needed "separateness" from your meds.

hope that is helpful.

~ waves ~

Dear Waves and Bizi,
Perhaps, I can take the vits when I first get home and eat a supper . . .still not sure how I can be one hundred percent sure that taking the vits does does not interfere with the meds. Sometimes after taking the vits, I feel that I have taken everything for the day. After 25 years of being on meds, I have learned that the pill box idea is not for me.
Maybe I can come up with a plan like a paper log so that I can know for sure that I have not taken them or have taken them.
It has heppened that I am not sure if I took them or not. I end up waiting three or four hours to see how I feel. After four hours being late, I can feel that I am missing my Verapamil and probably the others as well. So the next day stinks because I stay up later than usual. If I guess wrong and take double Klonopin or Gabapentin, the next day will stink due to brain fog. . . . . and so on.
I value your informative posts. Sometimes I half-remember parts of what you say from other things that I know or have heard you or others discussed here. I am happy to be reminded and given more information.

I am sorry that I did not respond appropriately. The work place is stressful because my sleep pattern is a mess. I start my day late. Otherwise, the day might be more leisurely.
There are people around me the whole time --- even in the bathroom. My "quiet" time for afternoon lunch involves other people. I will not take my vits to work.
I am sloppy with my stuff. I carry lots of things. So keeping track of the vits would be complicated.I am not going to add vits to my daily stress.

I am willing to consider how I can take them at home after work some days in ways that are completely separate from my meds.
Wow. This is a lot of words just to figure out how to take two vitamin pills.

I guess some things I really need to think through before I can make them work.
Perhaps right now is a good opportunity to admit that I rarely respond to change well. Yikes.
M

Dear Mari

change is hard.

your meds have priority over the vits.

it is ok to take your time to figure out a system that will work.

it took me time to figure it out. i did it with trial and error. if trial and error might mess up your meds, that is not a good way to go about it!

lunch never worked for me. when i had a regular job, i tried doing vits at lunch. i messed up (did not take them) about 75% of the time. the reasons are too varied to list!

btw, i take my night meds around 11 - whether or not i am actually going to bed then or not. that is about 4 hours after dinner+vits.

you need to be wary of calcium supplementation due to your verapamil, but you know that. other supps should be fine in the general sense, but i would still preferably distance them several hours from meds. my concerns here are 1. med absorption and 2. potential stomach upset.

~ waves ~

yikes. but i understand that somehow. the memory of the sensation of having swallowed pills, when the only pills you usually swallow are meds, suggests that the pills swallowed were your meds => brain says meds taken for the day.
yes, you definitely need some sort of mechanism/routine you can easily observe, so as to know precisely what has gone down the gullet and what has not.

when i first started logging my meds, a key aspect to avoid missing or double-dosing was this:

i made myself take the meds sitting in front of the log. i would
1. swallow the meds and
2. mark the log.

in that order and without activities in between 1 and 2 not even going to the bathroom. that way, i felt safe that if my log was marked i had taken the meds. if it was not marked, i had not taken the meds.

once things became routine for me, i allowed myself a little more freedom but not much.

~ waves ~

how is your vit D level mari, have you ever checked this?
Maybe we have had this conversation before.
bizi

Waves.
That is a good plan -- to take them at the same time whether or not you are going to bed.

I should find a way to separate the meds from bed time because bed time is fraught with so much difficulty. I get my meds in any time between 10:30 pm to 2:30 am.

Several years ago I was supplementing with up to 1500 or 2000 mgs of calcium a day. I got anxious and figured out was going on and dropped it. Then pdoc and I spoke about it. He said to watch for the places that have added calcium like grape juice and other grocery store items.

I think I can take up to a certain amount of calcium but I do not remember -- maybe it was like 500. One pill in this bottle contains 330 mgs Calcium but much of it is Calcium Carbonate (not much absorption).

Yes. I take b12 occasionally hours after the meds.
By the way, this expensive nearly full bottle of vits has an expiration date of June 2012. I will have to throw it away in JUne.


M --- probably need to re-organize my entire life to make the vits and other things work.

Waves,

Yes. You describe it exactly.


I can do something like that . .. . just not now. My head will feel clear and my house will be organized in May.

Two or three weeks ago I took too much gabapentin. I felt foggy and crappy the next day. I am thankful it happend on a weekend. I open the capsule, dump more than half, close the capsule back up and put it down next to my other meds by color. The opened closed capsule looks like the capsules that come straight from the factory.

I actually dump the powder I don't want and leave it on a paper towel until the next day so that I know that I have visual proof that I took my meds.

Mdoc needs to write a new script. I have to see her soon but I do not know when I can get the time. She does not go in on Thursdays. That leaves me with only Tuesday to see her.. . . too complicated. I used to make Tuesday appts and then cancel when something "important" showed up in my calendar for Tuesday. Finally I stopped making appts.

M