Today I discovered that last week's misadventures- which included bites from horseflies - had gone comically badly for me. I'll spare you the gore, but what started as a few small bites became inflamed, fist sized patches of pure pain, across my legs and arms.
My Doc prescribed antibiotics, with the instructions "take four times a day, on an empty stomach, meaning no food two hours before or one hour after the dose". That's 12 hours of no-eating time, right....? (Spoiler: no, technically it's wrong - three of the hours can be during sleep)
The trouble is, I also have COVID (oh, I'll definitely be covering this later...), and I couldn't work out for the life of me how to spread four doses through a day, nor what time I'd be able to eat meals, or what schedule my family would need to join me on, given the "dont eat two hours before or an hour afterwards" instruction.
So I've made a script to calculate timings for medicines like Penicillin, that need to be spread through a day. Yes this is kinda unusual, because I've been trying to post about running a start-up company, and food, but hey, that's why it's the Random Creation House. Since it's made, I figured I'd share it with you.
Here's an image of a clock with some pills around it, to demonstrate visually what's going on behind the scenes, and because the Search Engines give higher weighting to posts with images in:
Disclaimer
I shouldn't need to say this, but I will - I've roughly tested the code, and it seems to work, but if you do use this to plan your meds, then please manually check too. The code is basically untested (it does what I need it to, and I thought I'd share), and I've written it deep in both Covid, and in the middle of some gnarly insect bites, so its as good as its going to get.
It comes without any warranties, and its low quality code, so might not be fully accessible to screen-readers (though I have tried to keep the tab order as expected, and I've added labels etc).
Wow, that's two posts in a row with liability disclaimers. Yuck.
How it works
The scheduler is simple - add how many doses you need to take in a day. Add your usual wake-up time, and your usual bed time, and if your medication requires nil-by-mouth (or just no food) before and/or after the dose, then complete those fields too.
I've prepopulated the table with my own data... take 1x Penicillin (Flucloxacillin), evenly spread, four times per day, dont eat for two hours before the dose, and dont eat for an hour after.
Press "calculate" to see the results. Dark Green represents where you should take a dose, and Light Green is where you're on "no food".
Press "toggle sleep" to show/hide the period of time where you're sleeping.
Personal information
All processing is done client side on your device. We don't see, or store any of your data. We also don't run ads on this page, so no advertisers see your data either.
The code is free to use - if you want to use it, I'd be delighted if you'd let me know, and provide a link back to here to say where it came from.
The Random Medication Scheduler
It should get you close enough to at least know when you'll get opportunities to eat. Of course you don't have to be "to the minute" with these calculations, and my doc is reasonably happy for me to move my doses and hour or so either way; which helps with dinner plans!
If you like it, or if the calculator helped you, please share to socials, or let me know over on LinkedIn, or use our Contact Us section at the bottom of our About page. I really do love to read the feedback.
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