One of the most frustrating elements of my symptoms is memory issues. This is very common for people with neurological issues and chronic fatigue. Our memory system consists of several steps:
- Working Memory: focus, purpose and intent
- the ability to hold information or a goal in your head long enough to not lose track of what you are doing/hearing/saying; an early stage of short term memory
- Short Term Memory: temporary storage for a small amount of information for quick recall
- the ability to retain information from seconds or a few minutes ago
- Long Term Memory: longer lasting storage with greater capacity but slower access speeds
- the ability to remember what you did earlier in the day, last week or decades ago
It is common for long-COVID sufferers like me to have issues with Working Memory. While I have exceptional recall of information before my illness, I struggle to remember what was discussed 5 minutes ago, unless I took notes. I also forget to take my pills. My reminder alarm will go off, and in the 90 seconds it takes me to get to them, another thought crosses my mind and I forget all about the medicine.
Taking notes and using reminder alarms are two great examples of external memory aids, and people like me are encouraged to use them. When mental memory cannot be relied upon, external aids become survival necessities. Since I was still missing doses even with the reminder alarms, I added two more external aids to solve the problem:
A monthly pill organizer:
Medication and Supplement Pillbox Organizer
This lets me sort out all of my morning and evening pills for an entire 28-day cycle. If my reminder alarm goes off and I somehow get distracted before taking them, I (or my spouse) can later glance at the container and see if the pills are still sitting inside. No more re-counting every pill in the bottle from the pharmacy and trying to figure out if I took one or not. Each chamber is large enough to hold about a dozen pills, and the color differences for AM and PM helps prevent me getting confused and taking the wrong dose. This has been a HUGE help in stabilizing my medicine intakes and preventing missed or double doses. If you ever need to travel, you can just pop out organizers for however many weeks you need rather than have to lug the entire box with you.
The other item I use is a sort of physical tracker dashboard for my medicines:
Pet Feeding Reminder
Before you laugh, while it is obviously geared towards reminding people to
feed pets, the morning, afternoon and nighttime sliders helped me with my
medicines and supplements. Each time I
take a dose, I slide the little lever over to expose the green indicator. When paired with the reminder alarm and the
pill organizer, this makes it easy to see if I took my dose. And by adding this little extra step, it sort
of converts medicine taking into a focused ritual/habit and provides the same
sort of positive feedback people get from crossing off items to-do lists. Since the above organizer is geared to mornings and evenings, this 3-column slider lets me set a reminder for lunch-time doses.
Two other external memory aids that I find helpful are:
Google Keep: https://keep.google.com/
It's a simple free note taking app for Android devices so when anything happens that I need
to remember I can record it, search for it, etc. It’s linked to my Google account, so anywhere
that lets me sign into Google (web browser, phone, tablet, Chromebook, etc.)
will have all of my notes. It even supports drawing tools, in case you need to sketch something out as a reminder.
Bearable: https://bearable.app/
This is a free symptom tracking app that helps me track my health trends to try and
figure out what works and what does not.
I especially like the ability to create my own health questions I can
answer with a single click, such as rate the intensity of my headaches. It lets me tell it which medicines I am
currently taking, and even allows different reminder alarms for each one. Because it is easily customized, there is no forced walk through of a bunch of questions and symptoms from some default package; what you track is entirely up to you.
Note that even if you aren't a techie and do not like the idea of using phone apps to remember things, there is always the classic method of carrying around a small spiral notebook and pen wherever you go. The mere act of writing something down helps lock it into your memory, and having the notes later when you need them can be a big help.
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I invite on-topic, helpful comments from readers with free Google accounts. I am especially interested in comments that share useful tips for fighting long-COVID, Chronic Fatigue, Chronic Pain and Migraines. Off-topic comments, comments that name other sites or products without including much relevant textual explanation, and comments disparaging any person or group will be deleted. As I am trying to keep this a positive place, I may also delete comments in a despairing tone that focus only on symptom misery rather than helpful ways to combat it. Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and helpful tips!