Humor Me, Humira!

As I said in my last post, the time between getting off of Methotrexate and on to Humira took several weeks longer than I expected it to. 

I got the TB test done, and didn’t hear from my doctor that the results were negative until a week later when I e-mailed him.

Then came the adventure of trying to procure Humira… 

My doctor submitted the prescription to CVS.  When I went to CVS to pick it up, they told me that my insurance refused to fill the prescription at a commercial pharmacy and that it had to be submitted to a specialty pharmacy. 

So I e-mailed my doctor and called his office, saying that CVS had rejected it, and I had a number where they needed to submit it, but didn’t know what the pharmacy was or  where it was located.

This was Tuesday morning.  I got a call back on Tuesday evening, saying that the prescription was submitted to the specialty pharmacy.

As luck (I guess you can call it that) had it, I was going out to the place where the pharmacy is yesterday.  I don’t drive, and it is almost a 40 minute bus ride.

I got to the place Wednesday morning, and immediately went to the pharmacy.  They told me they had no prescription on file for me.  Frantically, I called my doctor’s office, and happened to get the person who had left me a message that the prescription had been submitted.  I explained the situation, and she said that actually, my doctor needed to review the prescription, and hadn’t got around to it yet.

She said she would try and make sure that it got taken care of so that I could pick up the prescription when I was done with my other appointment, and not have to make another trip back.

Thankfully, when I went back to the pharmacy, they had received the prescription.  Then they had to call my doctor’s office because they read the prescription as twice a week rather than every two weeks.  That would have been really bad!

Not feeling well, and being totally exhausted, were not a good combination, and I feared that one more obstacle in my way might send me over the edge, and that I would stop being nice and agreeable, and demand action. 

Nobody ever said that this journey was going to be easy or convenient. 

But finally, I had Humira.  I felt like I had some prized goods in my possession. 

And considering how much it costs – over $1,700 a month (of which my insurance covers nearly all, as long as I get it filled at a specific specialty pharmacy) – I guess I do.  I feel like I have to guard it with my life.

Getting here was a much longer road than I ever expected. 

I guess I knew that one day, I might have to consider the more aggressive treatments for RA.  And here I am.  I think that less than 24 hours after my first injection, it is too soon to tell the efficacy, but thankfully, I certainly don’t feel any worse. 

The good news is that, to me, the shot was very tolerable.  It wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but it wasn’t the fire and brimstone that I made it out to be.  I did not go nuclear on my thigh.  I was very nervous, especially since so many of the stories online sounded awful.  But I’m not judging.  I believe that people feel what they feel.  But it makes me realize that I shouldn’t pour over the Internet for these things, because it only sought to scare me.

And my boyfriend was with me.   I’m not sure which one of us was more nervous, but he was a real trouper, getting knee deep in my health stuff so early on in our relationship.

I am extremely grateful.

And I was glad that my reaction was one of, oh, I worried for nothing, that wasn’t so bad; instead of, wow, it was worse than people made it out to be.

I will say that I find it ironic that you have to be rather dexterous to pinch the skin with one hand and push the button to inject with the other, since most of us with RA struggle with dexterity.  But I do think, that since you have to alternate sites, it seems to me like it will be easier to go from thigh to thigh than it is with a traditional syringe.

I am glad that when I see my rheum in a little less than a month, I will be able to say that I have had several doses of Humira.  I was worried that I would have to go, tail between my legs, saying that I just couldn’t handle doing the injection.

But as experience has taught me, I would rather deal with 30 seconds of pain than the unending pain that lupus and RA have caused me over the last few years.  You can’t really put a price on feeling well and being functional, which I have not felt since I stopped taking MTX.

And once again, I am grateful to the chronic illness blogging community that has rallied around me during this time of stress and uncertainty as far as my health is concerned.