For the last few years, I have been taking Carbidopa/Levodopa (a.k.a., Levo) five times a day. My first dose is at 8:00 AM, then I take it every three hours through 8:00 PM. There have been months when my Levo would start wearing off as early as 30 minutes before the next scheduled dose. In those cases, I usually recognize what’s happening, and may even take the next dose a little early. But there have also been months when, as long as I took each dose on time, I didn’t experience any wearing off before the next dose was due. On the surface, this sounds great, and it generally is; however, it’s easy to forget to take my Levo when I’m not experiencing an off period. And even in the best of times, if I completely forget to take a scheduled dose, I do eventually start feelin’ it.

So, I set up alarms on my phone. Four alarms, each set to go off every single day (I didn’t set an alarm for the last dose of the day, as I hadn’t had difficulty remembering to take that one. This approach worked fairly well, but my behavior exposed some of its limitations. The biggest problem was that, whenever I was early or late taking a dose (which is frequent with me), my alarms for the rest of the day would need to be reset, or I’d just try to make a mental note to offset those remaining doses. So, when I replaced my phone recently, I decided ’twas time to implement a different approach.

In addition to the Alarm “tab” in my phone’s Clock app, there is also a Timer tab. So now, instead of having four ever-present alarms, I just set the Timer for three hours whenever I take my morning Levo dose. When the timer gets to zero, an alarm sounds AND it gives me a “reset” option, which I can tap for a fresh three-hour countdown, without having to remember or adjust for early or late doses. Also, the Timer doesn’t have a Snooze button, so I’m not as tempted to delay a dose when I’m in the middle of something. So far, this new strategy is working well: the frequency and severity of my off periods has been significantly reduced. So going swimming in the ocean with my phone turned out to be a good idea!