Great Choice Except For That One Little Thing

Okay. So, my PET/CT showed that I stayed pretty much the same. Of the three spots of "marginal uptake" from the previous PET/CT, one was completely gone, one looked to be exactly the same, and the third seemed to be ever so slightly larger. I feel like the results pretty well mirrored the effort—very intense for some time, then a bit of petering out of commitment.

Since they hadn't gone away completely (note: Dr Specht was, I think, utterly amazed that they hadn't taken over the world), I decided to opt for the chemo choice, which in this case is going to be the drug Xeloda, which I will take from home, three tablets in the morning and three in the evening for 14 days on, then 7 days off, in a 3-week cycle.

That is, I will take it from home if I can ever get the prescription filled.

Like Neupogen, the hilariously expensive shots I had the pleasure of self-administering, Xeloda does not have a generic form, and is itself hilariously expensive (I'll get back to you with the number when I see it). This means that Uniform, our otherwise generous and supportive insurance company, insists for some convoluted reason that I order this medication only through Bioscrip, a mail-order pharmacy. It takes about 10 days for a prescription to clear through the mail-order pharmacy's trolls, and in the meantime I am sitting here without it. That's not all, however: Bioscrip actually has a Seattle store, on Capitol Hill by the hospitals. BUT THEY WON'T LET YOU USE IT.

There is a baroque process involving lots of phone calls to lots of increasingly superior workers whereby Uniform will allow a one-time "work around" that enables you to fill your prescription at a pharmacy convenient to you, which I had to invoke a couple years ago when a $7,000 box of their drugs failed to be delivered to me, and that is what we're trying to do right now with this new medication. The SCCA pharmacy, unfortunately, knows exactly what to do because they SEE THIS ALL THE TIME.

So, when a new medication is prescribed for me to be started the next morning because, in my case, I HAVE CANCER, Uniform and Bioscrip basically thumb their noses at me. If only I'd thought of that before saying no to the Fasolodex.

(except, of course—my secret weapon—Oleander and MMS maybe did keep things under control for awhile—so I can outwait YOU, big business health insurance!)