bendamron's Cancer Blog

January 23, 2008

anticoagulants and co-pays

Views: 31

the past three weeks the doctors have been trying different blood thinners to control angel’s clotting. angel is allergic to heparin, has antibodies to lovenox and another similar drug that processes through the kidney rather than her liver. the latest drug she’s taking to is called arixstra (fondaparinux). yesterday, her platelet count was at 104 which is on the low side of normal, but has gradually gone up. she was down to around 60 two weeks ago. all good news. the struggle we were faced with was the price of this drug. it costs $136 per dose per day, and she needs this as long as she has cancer. add the numbers, and multiple it, you get about 50K per year! i felt guilty about this last week, and that i wasn’t able to provide angel with what she needed, but even for someone that makes 150K, and after taxes, they’d be paying out 50% of their income! because of the financial reasonings, dr malpass was going to try coumadin one last time since he never exhausted this resource to begin with (which only costs $10 per month) but since it processes through the liver, it’s not ideal. good news, this morning i contacted ‘bridge access’ a program glaxso-smith-kline has to help people like us pay for their expensive meds. it looks like once we exhaust the 3K cap on co-pays (next month) they will supply 100% of these shots until the co-pay starts again next year, and then the process repeats! pretty stellar! this takes so much of the burden off of me, even though then i will pay 100% for any additional drugs out of pocket, this is still manageable. there are discount programs out there for general prescription drugs that my friends and experts have already brought to my attention which i will exhaust if need be.
anything in the good news department is welcomed.

when i woke this morning, i noticed that angel’s breathing was almost normal, instead of the short rapid pace. i told her this, and she replied with, ‘your morning breath is a little worse today’ ;) it amazes me that her sense of humor was present even after she experienced the worst and scariest night of hallucinations, and unmanageable nightmares. during one episode, she sprang up and said she didn’t know who i was, and asked for her benny. i held her for a while until her thoughts settled.

angel is recuperating in the living room, enjoying the sun. this morning she said she felt something different. she couldn’t quite place it. but it wasn’t pain, nor did it feel like anything bad. we both thought that her tumors are reacting well to the new mix of chemo??? in any case, moments like this, feeling positive about this effed up thing is truly what it’s about.

Posted on January 23, 2008 at 6:10:00 PM by angel & ben ( anticoagulants and co-pays, 0 comments)