Day 242

I got a call from my pharmacy today to tell me that my prescription for Peginterferon had been approved by insurance. I was initially pleased to hear this until I heard the pharmacist say "...and the portion of the cost that you will be responsible for is $1144.80." "I thought you said this had been approved by insurance," I said. "It has," said the pharmacist. "The $1144.80 is just the residual amount you pay after your insurance has paid their part." "Is this for the entire treatment," I asked.  "No," said the pharmacist. "This is just for one month of medication."

This definitely isn't good news. Especially considering that treatment could last as long as a year. I was almost scared to ask about the ribavirin pills, which are also part of the treatment. "Oh, that one is just a generic," said the pharmacist. "The ribavirin will only cost you $5 a month." Now why couldn't they combine the ribavirin with some other reasonably priced generic drug instead of the super expensive Peginterferon? I've heard from leukemia patients that their prescription drug costs often exceed $3000 a month, even when they do have insurance. Somehow, I thought I could escape all this. I need to talk to my doctor on Monday.

After this inauspicious start to the weekend, you would think that the rest of the day would have to get better.  Not really. I tried and failed for the third time to get my new financial planning software working properly. I've been promising Janet that I would install Photoshop on her laptop, but when I finally found a version on one of my machines that was new enough to run on her Intel Mac, it turned out to be an upgrade and wouldn't install properly. Adobe can be very irritating. Cannot find the version you upgraded from on your hard drive said a message in a dialog box. Well of course you can't find it. It isn't there! The version I upgraded from years ago on a completely different computer is so old that it won't even run on an Intel Mac. So now I've managed to install a huge bloated CS3 version of Photoshop that has already reverted to a useless 30 day demo which keeps asking me if I'd like to purchase a serial number every time I launch it.

I did manage to fix a little folding grocery cart that broke when the groceries it was carrying last week got too heavy. That was about the limit of my abilities today.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day