The Med Bag

The Med Bag is where we keep all current medications.  Early in our transplant journey, it was clear that we were ineffectively juggling the medications. We needed a better system – an organized and easily transportable system.

We stopped for a meal at a Cracker Barrel on our way home from a doctor appointment and I happened to see a gardening bag on sale.  It caught my eye.  And I’m glad it did!  We’ve used that bag for toting medications since 2012 and it’s been perfect!  It’s sturdy, easy to carry and has lots of pockets. Bonus: our snap-n-stack containers fit in it perfectly.

I have three categories of medication storage:  Active, Upcoming and Inactive.  Our active and upcoming containers stay in the bag at all times.

Our active batch is in three snap-n-stack containers that I found at Walmart. They hold all the medications we use on a weekly basis to fill the pill tray.  We have one pill sorting day a week, usually on Wednesdays, when we use the Active container to fill the pill tray.

The Upcoming tray is like our back-up system and holds all the prescriptions that my husband is currently using. When a bottle runs out in the Active container, we move a replacement bottle from the Upcoming container.

We have an Inactive tray to keep those medications that my husband is not taking currently, but may again take in the future.  We store the Inactive container away in a kitchen cabinet to avoid clutter in The Med Bag.

When we are leaving for a trip, we add one more container to the med bag which contains a blood pressure cuff, a thermometer, and a pulse oximeter for use at the hotel, if needed.