Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The first order of business after I’ve been out of touch for a while is to come here and give y’all an update on what went wrong. Yet, something the weekend doctor said sort of put it all in perspective for me.
Doc wasn’t on duty last weekend when I was admitted, and I got his “weekend warrior” replacement instead. By all accounts he’s good, and people like him a lot, but I admit my first impression of him the last time we met wasn’t all that great.
This time however, after a brief Q and A session to get him up to speed, he made that one cardinal mistake that makes me like these guys; he was honest.
“Well, it’s like this,” he says. “You’re broken, and we don’t know why which means we don’t know how to fix you, so we might as well make you feel better.”
For once, no translation is necessary. For the first time, someone other than Doc told me something straight out. And for the rest of the week, we worked on exactly that; making me not *feel* what-all was wrong by burying me in drugs. :)
By the end of the week, I had a cocktail, and a regimen to disburse it, that worked well enough to (gasp) eat.
Given that, it was time to bail, with assurances that insurance could be cajoled to approve the cocktail ingredients. (A list of drugs that’d let me start my own pharmacy.)
I got discharged just in time for Reality to assert itself.
Merinol: Denied.
Zofram: Denied.
MS Contin @ 100mg: Denied.
MS Contin @ 30mg: Approved.
Dilaudid @ 4mg: Approved.
WTF? Apparently those assurances weren’t such a sure thing after all. Laugh.
I sort of felt sorry for the lady that gave them to me. Apparently she was the only one surprised, the poor dear.
So, since I got out, I’ve spent the time rocking and reeling, and working with what I did get, trying to find a semblance of efficacy. (Which is why it took me so long to update this blog. I’ve not been 100% successful as yet.)
In the long run, it’s just as well because by all reports, I will lose the insurance sooner or later. (Refer back to that bizarre Disability thing a few weeks back) and when I do, all my medications will be out of pocket, unless we find some other program. There are some, at least. The trick will be to find one that applied to a drug that works, AND be accepted. Not exactly an impossibility, given I have a small army of folks looking into the situation from their various standpoints.
I may not have faith in the medical industry, but I have all kinds of faith in those few people who struggle against it from the inside. Between them, and me, and whatever sort of cosmic intervention that might apply, I may yet finally be able to see if the experimental drug works. I can’t take that until the stomach thing stabilizes, and between you, me, and the fencepost, there seems to be improvement on that score.
Fingers crossed!
Patric