As we get older, it is only natural for our health to begin to decline. Different issues start to arise every year or few months even, and you gain more medications than you can count on one hand. Or maybe you acquire some health problems early on in life, like an autoimmune disease or cancer that requires you to take an array of different medications throughout your day.

Taking a lot of different medications makes some of our favorite things, like traveling, much more difficult, and some people might even think impossible. But we have some guidance for you on this matter. Our friends at the Teton Cancer Institute, who specialize in hematology oncology, know what it’s like for patients who feel limited by their medications and diseases/disorders. So, they have put together this list of tips to help you feel more confident in traveling with your medications.

Plan Ahead

If you want to go on a trip, that’s great! You shouldn’t let any manageable health issues and the medications associated with them keep you from experiencing the world. But, as you’re planning your trip, make sure you plan for your medications too.

Are any of your prescriptions going to run out while you’re on your trip? Make sure you pick up more before you leave. When you are packing, be sure to pack all of your required medications as well. Packing them by day into pill organizers will help you stay organized and make sure that you have enough of each medication.

Set Alarms

When traveling, we tend to get out of our daily routine. We wake up at different times, we’re out and about more often, and the routine of our daily life is not the same. When we change our routines, it’s easy to forget about some of the small, yet important, items that we need to take care of – like taking medications.

Set alarms on your phone for every time that you need to take your medication for every day that you will be gone. This will help you stay on task and ensure that you don’t miss any doses. Another thing you can do is write it into your itinerary if you’re worried about missing it.

If you are traveling abroad or to a time zone that is significantly different from your own, you can start readjusting your sleeping and eating schedule ahead of time, and when you do this, adjust your pill schedule to fit to your new sleeping and eating times.

Keep Your Medication On You

Anything can happen when you’re traveling, and the last thing you need is to miss a critical medication. So, make sure to keep at least that entire day’s medication on you. That way, if you have to take a medication in the middle of the day and your plans change, you don’t have to go back to your hotel or Airbnb to take it.