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Drug pusher

elaborate meds dispenser box
lots of pills to keep track of

My dad has been taking 22 scheduled pills daily. Most are prescription, with some various multivitamins and low-dose aspirin in the mix. Medicine management is one of the key things that he needs help with. Keeping track of all the random pills and dosage notes is not something he can manage.

We’ve got them currently set up to fit nicely into the 4 times a day pill dispenser. He has alarms on his iPad set to tell him ‘Hey take your medicine!’ but still without someone keeping an eye on things, mistakes are easy. I’ve seen him open a different day/time. I’ve seen him miss the alarm completely. I’ve seen him drop pills and not notice, thinking he put them in his mouth, etc. So while I still separate them into the daily portions to keep things easier for both of us, the real key is to make sure he gets the right ones at the right time.

One encouraging development: we just met with his new neurologist (since moving here) and she told us to stop taking one of the meds, reducing his daily pills to 20. Hopefully this reduction will help with the hallucinations. She was puzzled as to why he was taking it in the first place since the Parkinson’s symptom wasn’t one that was really manifesting with his mix of symptoms. I’m hopeful that this will be a positive change for his treatment, but it will likely take a week or two to have any sense of impact.

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Uh oh, I ruined Halloween

Here’s the quick story on how I messed up my kid’s Halloween night.

About a month ago he said he wanted to be a “Ghost Knight” and we started to look at references. Evil knights from older movies, zombie knights from Scooby Doo, the Black Knight from Monty Python, undead warriors from Thor Ragnarok, etc. We settled on a general design and I started working on some pieces trying to think of how best to make it work.

The key part was going to be glowing eyes, so his head needed to fit inside where he could see out but make his face hidden from the outside with red lights in a place that wouldn’t block his vision. So we made the helmet first and it was set up to fit over his baseball cap so that the glowing eyes would be above while he could easily look out from below.

Since I’m home with my dad, it was fun to have a little side project to work on when my dad was napping or using his iPad. I decided to make the armor out of cardboard and paint it with metallic spray paint. Velcro would be used to keep the pieces wrapped around his clothes and the only part I ordered was a toy sword that went well with his knight’s style.

cardboard knight costume
Here’s the interim state of the armor. Helmet, feet and arms not attached to the main suit.

At one point, he was coming home and checking progress, often saying ‘this is so cool!’ Oh what’s that parenting committee? You would like to recognize me as Father of the Year already? Well, if you insist!

Son in his costume before the rain destroyed it
Here’s the costume as we put it on after parking in Norwich, VT (Norwich is across the river from our town and does a townwide trick-or-treat that we’ve done the past 4 years.

Uh oh. It seemed to be disintegrating with each step. Below is a dramatization of the costume coming apart.