KonMari 9: Komono, Medicine

Short version: Today is the day to clean out all the medicines, vitamins, and other medical supplies in your house!

Longer version: 

Depending on you family size (and health, and belief in preventative medicine, and tendency to hoard) you may have just one small cabinet with medicine, or you may have a stockpile like mine. I had three bathrooms and a kitchen counter top full of things in this category.

I'm clearly running an underground pharmacy. 

The first step is always to gather similar items together. So I took everything from all my many hiding places and piled them on my kitchen table. Then I began to sort. Vitamins together, prescriptions together, first-aid supplies together, etc.

This was definitely eye-opening. On a normal day, my kids would struggle to find a band-aid or a beneydryl. And if anyone gets sick, I'd likely head to the drug store and buy a bottle of cough medicine. So imagine my surprise when I discovered we actually owned hundreds of bandages and five boxes of cold medicine. And eight bottles of ibuprofen, and three bottles of vitamin C, and four hospital grade face masks (very timely during a pandemic!), and 12 inhalers, and 6 expired epi-pens!
The list (and VOLUME) of things we had stored in our cupboards was embarrassingly long.

In my defense, there are three people in my house who use two types of inhalers each.

Once I had all these things sorted into categories, it was time to purge. Some things really needed thrown out. This is hard for me to do. In my mind even expired drugs still have value. In an emergency and expired drug might be more useful than no drug at all right? (This is not sound medical advice and should not be followed). You should probably throw out any medication that has already expired.  I did not. But I did at least whittle it down a bit. While I can justify in my own mind a scenario in which I might one day need an expired epi-pen, it is much harder to imagine needing SIX expired epi-pens. So I threw out five.

In a perfect KonMari world, I would hold these bottles to my heart and contemplate which ones gave me joy. But honestly I just couldn't bring myself to try and find joy in my anti-itch cream, so all my decisions were based solely on what I felt was still usable.

Once I had sorted it all into categories and thrown out everything I could, I was time to think about putting things away. I started thinking about where I actually used medicine and where I could safely store it. 

I decided I'd like to have a medical kit in my car. I found a little pouch and  filled it with all the basics I usually wish for on a car ride. Pain medicine, benedryl, motion sickness pills, band-aids, etc. (Storing medicine in the uncontrolled temperature of your car may not actually be good for them, but that is a problem for another day).

Every car trip just got a whole lot better now that I don't have a migraine and the kids aren't throwing up!

Then I pulled out one of each type of medication we use daily. My husband and I keep our personal prescriptions in our own bathroom, but the kids' daily prescriptions were put in a bin on the kitchen counter along with everyone's daily vitamins, a bottle of pain medicine, and a bottle of allergy pills (these are things we definitely use every day).  

After that, I had three basic kinds of things left: first aid supplies, slings and braces, and extra vitamin/pill bottles.

All the extra slings, braces, and ace bandages were put together in a bin up high on a shelf where they're easy to find, but out of the way.

All the first aid supplies (bandages, burn creams, anti-botic ointment, etc) were put together in one clear tote in my bathroom.

This probably still looks messy to some, but it is a thousand percent better than before.

The rest of the bottles were stacked in semi "neat" rows in a drawer, so that I can find them when I need them. Having everything group together lets me know what I really have and when I actually need to buy more.

The surprising result of all this was that when I took out all the medical supplies and put them into one drawer, every other drawer got cleaner. My boys' bathroom drawer now only holds dental supplies, and is surprisingly tidy!

So here's what I learned....
I was storing a lot of medical supplies "just in case." I hate to throw things out, and I was worried that I might need them one day and regret not having them. But the truth is I had so much that I didn't even know what I had. So I really had to get rid of a lot, in order to appreciate and use what I actually need.
Also, I was storing medicine in a lot of different places. I had a bottle of ibuprofen in nearly every room in my house. This seemed handy because in theory it was always right where i needed it. But in reality I could never find it. If someone had a headache, they would wander room to room trying to find a stray bottle, because they were literally spread all over the house. The beauty of having all the medicine in only one place, is that I ALWAYS know where they are.  So maybe I have to get up from the living room, and walk ALL the way to the bathroom, but I know when I get there, I'll find what I need. And that is true convenience.