eyedrops

[xela]

When I got the chance to move my second surgery up to a mere 11 days after the first, one of the things I scrambled to get done during my three remaining days of normal sight was to enter my eyedrop schedule into iCal. When I mentioned the convolutions of this to Alyse, she suggested that maybe this was the reason they normally schedule them four weeks apart: an elderly might not be able to keep on top of it.

I'm not sure she was wrong.

At any rate, I thought this might amuse some of you.

I have three different eyedrops, which I decided immediately upon getting them two weeks ago to think of as beige cap, pink cap, and grey cap. The rules for when to take them are:

• None is ever to be taken within fifteen minutes of another.
• For the first week after surgery, each is to be taken four times daily.¹
• Week 2:
  • Cease grey cap
  • Drop pink cap to 3 times daily
  • Continue beige cap as before.
• Week 3:
  • Drop pink cap to 2 times daily
  • Continue beige cap as before.
• Week 4:
  • Drop pink cap to 1 time daily
  • Continue beige cap as before.

So, a 28-day plan for taking a total of 210 eyedrops with a repeating pattern that's not too complex to keep in your head, though some notes might be handy.

Now: interleave two of them, one starting 11 days after the other.

Once, I'd have gone to an office supply store, bought some blank calendar pages (remember those?), and spent... probably something like a couple hours noting each of the 420 eyedrop times on it — then hung it on the wall and checked each off over the ensuing weeks.

A decade ago I'd have spent maybe an hour putting together something in Excel — ten printed it, hung it on the wall and checked each off over the ensuing weeks.

Now, I spent perhaps 20 minutes (and that only because iCal's UI for this is really quite terribly mouse-intensive) entering a series of repeating appointments into iCal, and then altering them as necessary in subsequent weeks. And instead of having to consult a calendar on the wall, my phone periodically beeps at me with a message on its screen like eyedrop beige B or eyedrop pink L. Making keeping on top of the schedule trivial.² Annoyances with iCal's UI aside aside I have to say isn't living in the future grand?

---

¹ That is, four times daily distributed across my waking hours: I'm not supposed to wake myself up in the middle of the night to take eyedrops.

² When I initially set it up, I didn't expect to be able to read the notifications on my iPhone's screen during right-eye recovery. I have iCal set to sync to Google calendar, and was prepared to go to my computer and look at a very enlarged version of it each time the alarm went off. I'm really glad that didn't turn out to be necessary.

Comments

[nakor.livejournal.com]

If iCal's GUI frustrates you enough, and you're syncing with gcal anyway, you might like gcalcli.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I think you mentioned that on zephyr when I was trying to go down the control iCal from the command-line through the power (cough) of Apple Events rathole. I recall making a mental note to go back through the logs to check out that or something like it if I couldn't ultimately sink my teeth into that rat. (To add a terrier to the rathole metaphor and thereby grossly overextend it.)

[cfox.livejournal.com]

At one point, Stella's (our dog's) opthamologist had her on four different eye drops, one of which was on a three times per day schedule in one eye, and twice per day in the other (I suspected he did this largely to be ornery, because that would be in character). But hers all come with standing instructions to space them by five minutes, which makes a big difference to the manageability.

For the last few years, it's just been once each per day, on four different drops, so I do them on either side of breakfast, and either side of dinner - the food helps maintain a positive association with eye drops.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I'm just glad my ophthalmologist isn't ornery.

[cfox.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wouldn't tolerate a veterinary general practitioner with his problems, let alone someone expected to treat humans. But in this case my strongest action has been to resolve to speak up next time he harasses his staff in front of me.