brain meds

The timing and rules surrounding the special brain-cancer chemotherapy I'm on seem a bit much. I mean, I have a brain tumor, fer cryin' out loud, which means I have a hard time even remembering whether I ate breakfast today or not. I suspect that sometimes I eat it twice. And trying to remember whether I've taken my meds? Oh my God. The meds are the worst, because there are a lot of them and they all have to be taken at different times, some of them in complicated relations to each other. I have those little pill boxes with the days of the week marked on them to help me with some of them. But what about the pills you take three times a day, not at very specific hours, but in a time relation to another pill you're supposed to take later? I have pills for which you literally need to be carrying around a timer: this pill you take two hours before that blue one there, but no more than one hour after you've taken the pink and white one here. It's a nightmare.

And you have to wonder about the irony of drug companies of brain tumor medication asking a BRAIN CANCER patient, of all people, to remember and keep track of all this! Isn't it absurd? I mean, come on: I have a big ol' TUMOR right in the middle of my BRAIN, and they're asking me to remember non-specific time relations between events? It's hard not to see the process as a deliberately concocted mind-f***, designed just to mess with us. I need a small minion to follow me around and take away my pill bottles once I've taken the one specified for that particular hour. Otherwise I'm quite likely to go back, see the bottle sitting there, and take another of the same. And maybe even another one after that. Asking me to check off a little box to keep track doesn't help, either, because when I see (or fail to see) a check I still don't remember making it, and so I doubt myself anyway.

It's quite frightening, really, especially on the days when I'm home all alone. What do people do who don't have round-the-clock caregivers to check up on them?