I can now look after my three children properly

Honor Tomlin is a single mother with three children all of whom struggle with a range of medical issues. She homeschools and manages the medication for the three, all the while trying to find time to care for her mental and physical well being.

Erin, her eldest, is 15 years old and was diagnosed with an eating disorder several years ago.

This is on top of her Autism, Asperger’s and ADHD. Her brother, 13-year-old Hamish, also has Asperger’s, Autism and ADHD, while Chelsea who is a year younger than Hamish, has ADHD, separation anxiety and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) – a behavioural condition that leads to sporadic outbursts of aggression.

When asked about how she finds time to care for herself, she responded that even her doctor was amazed at how she can keep it going. “I do have friends that I can talk to, but most of the time I just get on with it and do it all on my own … My doctor thinks it is amazing that I just keep going, but what else are you going to do but get on with it?”

But throughout the years, the stress was unknowingly taking a toll on her mental and emotional well being. It wasn’t until Tomlin’s mother pointed it out that she sought help. “I am 42 now and I was diagnosed [with anxiety] only one year ago,” Tomlin explains.

“Because of the stress, I would sometimes do crazy things like buying three new cars in a year and re-mortgage the house. I think, to be honest, it was probably what caused the end of my marriage,” she added.

During one of her pharmacy trips, she was introduced to the MedAdvisor app which she describes as a “blessing.”

“... I was at my usual pharmacy at Ravenswood and the pharmacist there, Dianne, suggested that I download the [MedAdvisor] app.”

Prior to the app, Tomlin would visit the pharmacy every couple of days for the variety of medications her and her children were on; it was “ … hard to keep track,” sometimes, Tomlin would miss doses of medication as a result of misplacing scripts.

“I would misplace scripts and then return to the doctor and tell him that I misplaced them, and he would say, ‘How can you lose a script’ and I would say, ‘Well if you saw the chaos at home you would understand’.”

However, now with the MedAdvisor app, Tomlin can manage and even match up timelines between herself and her children better. “If I have three days left on a script, and my son has two, then I will refill both of them at the same time.”

“I recently just put in $44 worth of scripts to pick up and that should do me for three weeks,” she explained.