Inching Forward

Hey, everybody.  I haven't posted for a while.  I'm mostly hanging around on twitter these days.  140 characters fits my lifestyle better than a whole blog.  Generally speaking, not much happens to talk about.

There have been some changes recently, though.  Last week I saw the new GI after having a colonoscopy in early July.  (Nothing dire, they just like to take a peek at the insides every once in a while to make sure there aren't any nasty surprises.)  He reviewed all my files, and we discussed, and bottom line is that I'll be starting Humira as soon as we can get it approved by insurance.  I've known this was coming for a while.  I'm hopeful that the new med will mean an improvement in my health and quality of life.  But I'm kind of dreading it, too.  The last big med I was on was Remicade.  It's an IV drug, which was no big deal.  (I got over my discomfort with IVs after spending 2 weeks in the hospital five years ago.)  Someone else does all the work.  All the patient has to do is sit there and wait for it to finish dripping.  Humira is a self-injection.  I'm going to have to get over my squeamishness and learn to stick myself.  It'll be an injector pen, like an epi-pen, so nowhere near as bad as it could be.  But I'm kind of underwhelmed by the idea anyway.

The other new thing is a bit more positive.  I went to the Y today and signed up for a membership.  I'm *finally* going to start going to water arthritis classes again.  The next class is Wednesday afternoon, so barring surprise!period (which wouldn't totally shock me-- my cycle has been running at about 25 days lately, but I'm hoping it will at least wait until the weekend), I hope to be back in the pool then.

Also, Troub hasn't been doing so well lately.  He's not eating much, and when he does eat he pukes it back up about half the time.  The vet thinks his allergy to his food has finally gotten to be too much.  We switched to a different food, which helped for a while, but now he doesn't want to eat either brand.  And he hasn't been getting his steroid, because the only way we could get it in him was to squirt it on his food.  No eating, no steroid.  Without the steroid it's become obvious that he has arthritis problems.  I talked to the vet again this morning, and she wants me to significantly up his steroid dosage.  Somehow.  My brother is coming over shortly to see if he can get it in him.  He likes my brother.  He (the cat, not my brother) has been hiding, first in my parents' closet and then under my bed, since he spotted me with the syringe this morning.  The really frustrating part is that he used to *love* his medicine.  And then all the sudden he decided he didn't like it any more.  (I get it from a special veterinary compounding pharmacy, and it's tuna flavored.  We're going to refill in chicken flavor and see if he likes that any better.)

So that's all the scary, positive, frustrating news around here.  At this rate, I'll have more news in another couple months.  In the meantime, look for me on twitter.  I'll be the one making smartass comments and retweeting stuff.

Happy Days Are Here Again!

Another round of good news on the medication front.  My doctor's office called this morning.  The makers of Savella (my other Fibro medication) approved my patient assistance, and there was 3 months worth of free meds waiting for me at the office!  Yay!  My Fibro meds are the only ones I take that are too new to have a generic, which means they are the most expensive.  Now that I'm getting both of them for free, my monthly med costs have gone down by about 3/4.  That's huge-- a significant line item in the monthly budget slashed.

In other news, I've got the Kindle down to 724 items.  So far it hasn't made a bit of difference.  In fact, the battery is dying even faster.  But that might be because of all the clicking around to delete stuff.  I'll go back to more normal usage for the next couple of days and see if there's any improvement.

And more good news-- I have a solid story idea to work on.  Last night I was thinking about a story I started almost 15 years ago and abandoned.  The actual pages are long gone at this point (trust me, it's no loss), but the idea lingered.  As I was falling asleep last night it fused with another scrap of an idea, and suddenly I have a viable story idea.  In the next few days I'm going to work on Kelley Armstrong's Outlining 101, and then I want to start writing March 1st.  I'm not going to push myself to NaNo it.  I'm afraid I'll flame out in a couple of days at that kind of pace.  But I'd definitely like to finish March with a nice chunk of pages.  I've also had a little bit of a brain wave about the story I was working on last fall during Discovery.  So I think I may end up outlining both at the same time.  We'll see how confused I get.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gingerale

Happy, Happy Day!

The doorbell rang a few minutes ago.  FedEx delivery.  It was addressed to me, although I wasn't expecting anything.  I open the package, and lo and behold-- medicine!  Three months worth of Lyrica, free!  That's almost $750 retail.  I sent in paperwork to Pfizer's patient assistance program a couple weeks ago, and they've already sent me my first shipment.  Thank you, Pfizer!

Fun With Drugs

I just finished pricing my meds at all the local pharmacies.  Fun, fun, fun.  I have no health insurance at the moment, and the future does not look promising on that front, so I'm paying for all my meds out of pocket.  Let me tell you, this shit ain't cheap.  If you've got prescription drug coverage, raise a glass to your insurance provider.  You could be paying much, much more.

I was a little surprised at first how widely the prices varied at different pharmacies.  Then I thought I would end up with a different prescription at every pharmacy in town.  But it turns out that the best prices are evenly split between two places-- Sam's Club and Walgreen's, with the W card.  All but one of the worst prices are at CVS.  The cheapest refills will save me a little more than $150 over the most expensive ones.  That's a pretty big difference when you consider it's the exact same pills in either bottle.

On a brighter note, I remembered something about the trip from Massachusetts to Indiana that I forgot to tell you.  (I have Swiss cheese for brains, I swear.)  As we were driving through Pennsylvania we passed about a million deer crossing signs.  But someone in the Keystone State has a sense of humor, so they looked a little something like this (not my picture):

Happy Wednesday, y'all!

Why I Hate the Drug Companies

This afternoon I crossed state lines in an attempt to buy prescription medication.  In the good old days (you know, like August) I could go down the street and get a prescription from my local pharmacy for $30 because I had prescription drug coverage through my insurance.  Now I am uninsured, but I still need medicines, this one particularly, because it's a steroid and you can just stop those puppies cold turkey.

So I called around last week to find out who had my prescriptions for the best prices.  Target was the winner with this one at $1011 for a one month refill.  That's right.  One month.  So, plan B.  I remembered I had a card from the drug company that would help me pay for this medication.  So I took it to Walgreens, where I was picking up another prescription at the time, and asked them to check it out.  Turns out the card is worth $500.  Woo hoo!  But it's good everywhere but Massachusetts, where I currently live.  sigh.  Time for a new plan.

So I take my prescription bottle with all the info on it and my magic card to a Target across the state line in New Hampshire.  No big deal.  It's not that far away, and my parents had errands they wanted to run in the area anyway.  I give the bottle and the card to the pharmacist, explain that I'd like to transfer my prescription to Target and get as many pills as the $500 card will allow.  Call me if there are any problems.

An hour later I'm sitting on a bench in the mall, waiting for my parents to do something or other, when I get a call from Target.  They're very sorry, but they can't get the card to work.  You must have primary insurance that will pay for at least part of the prescription, and then the card will cover the rest, up to $500.

Hell.

After suppressing the urge to throw things, I asked her how much one week of the prescription would cost.  $232.26.  Fortunately, steroids require tapers, and one week of the prescription as written is actually three weeks of medication for me.  (You're supposed to take 1 pill a day for 6 weeks to safely taper.  It's going to be more like 30 days.)  So I gritted my teeth and bought the damn drugs.

And then I had a perfectly miserable time thinking of all the things I could have bought with that $232.26.

• 1/3 of a month's medical insurance premium
• a car payment on my beloved Toyota that I had to sell when I moved here
• one of the super fancy Tivos that I was drooling over the other night
• a month's supply of three other prescriptions put together
• almost 5 months worth of cell phone service
• 29 books for my Kindle

Clearly, there are other things I could have spent that money on.  Why was I in this predicament?  (Other than the fact that I have a chronic disease that I did not ask for and have no control over.)  Because a drug company gave out cards offering to pay for $500 worth of medication, medication that is criminally expensive to begin with, and then refused to allow people with out insurance, the ones who really need it, to use the card.  How fucked up is that?  When I had insurance the card wasn't worth the hassle.  Now that I desperately need the card, it won't work because I don't have insurance.  What this drug company has done is place advertisements in doctors' offices (which they aren't supposed to do, right?) and called them patient assistance cards.  They placed these cards knowing that they would never have to pay on the vast majority of them because for the vast majority of us they are worthless.

Bastards.

One good spot in all this mess-- I got a $10 Target card from the pharmacist.  I think she felt bad for me.  I'm going to save it just in case I need more of this medication.  It will almost buy me one pill.

Great Googly Moogly

I spent part of the day today calling pharmacies and pricing my most urgent prescriptions now that I don't have insurance or prescription drug coverage.  Never do this.  It's too depressing for words.

I only priced the four that need to be refilled in the next two weeks.  No point in going through the hassle if it doesn't need to be refilled yet, because the prices might be different in Indiana.  One of my prescriptions-- just one prescription, for one month-- is $1011.49.  And that's the cheapest price I could find for that one.  It's a steroid, and I've been weening myself off of it anyway, so I may just take my last nine pills and hope for the best.  I have a bottle of Prednisone for emergencies.  It plays merry hell with the body, but it's cheap.  If I start to crash and burn without the other steroid I'll just start up on the Pred.  I could buy a couple of years' worth of Pred for the price of one month of the other stuff.

I will say one thing for my thousand dollar steroids.  They make my $130/month Savella look mighty cheap in comparison.  And the Savella, at least in the short term, would be much more miserable to go off.