Sue: The attitudes of others – Taking ‘many’ medicines (2)
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Sue
Female
Age at interview: 65
Number of medicines: 16
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Sue will often deflect people’s questions with a light-hearted response. At other times she actually finds it helpful to talk about medicines with someone new.
Sometimes, if I don't know them well and it's a light-hearted sort of place, I'll just say ‘Oh yes, I'm addicted now here's another one’ and change the subject. But if it's a different context or a different person I might talk a bit more about it. I also don't particularly want to get into those long conversations about I'll tell you about my illness, you tell me about yours, which are all too common as we get older. I mean I've had plenty of those too of course. Sometimes it's handy—I mean, what does prednisone do to you? Half the people I know seem to be on prednisone for various conditions. So we can swap symptoms and sometimes that's quite handy. It's reaffirming to know that other people have sleep disturbance because of it, which is one of the major things that I suffer from. But you don't want to do that every time.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.