drug deals

yesterday, in the midst of trying to teach summer school, i made or received six different phone calls about IUI prescriptions. i still hadn't heard from the insurance company as of yesterday morning, and since my period is due any second i was concerned that the drugs wouldn't arrive in time. i stopped by the doctor's office when they opened yesterday morning and they gave me the direct number to reach the fertility people at my prescription company, saying (of course), "yeah... medco sometimes takes a bit longer than others. we'd better stay on them." they gave me the name of the woman at their office that i should contact if medco gave me "any trouble."

thus began my string of phone calls throughout the day. there was a lot of being on hold, waiting for calls back, and then me calling back because i got impatient waiting. but by 6pm when i was standing outside of the subway station waiting for all of the calls to end so i could go underground and go home, everything was taken care of. and it's a whole lotta stuff. it seems that even though i normally ovulate just fine, they're going to do the whole thing artificially to make it as predictable as possible. which is guess is ok. fewer variables can't be bad.

there are five medications in total. i don't remember the names of most of them. three of them were no problem for my prescription insurance company to fill. but for one of them -- HcG, the ovulation "trigger" shot -- they had to call my doctor's office to get a paper prescription because it's a controlled substance. and for another -- vaginal progesterone suppositories... ugh -- they simply couldn't get the drug so they sent it to another specialty pharmacy called Freedom that will fill it (and they had to call me also, of course, to figure out all of those details). i have to call the doctor's office today to make sure the paper prescription was sent out, but otherwise i think all is in order. since a number of the prescriptions need to be refrigerated, i am having it all delivered to school tomorrow. which should be day 2 of my cycle, so i'll have everything in time to start on day 3. (though i still haven't gotten my period, so i may have even more leeway than i need.)

if it doesn't work the first try and we need to order everything again, i just have to call the prescription company for refills, since i was prescribed three of everything. but i probably won't be using the third refill, because we'd have to pay for those drugs out of pocket. i didn't know that until yesterday. i asked the representative about my copays, which aren't tiny but aren't terrible (this round will cost a couple hundred dollars in copays), and she gave me that info and also let me know that my insurance has a cap on fertility prescriptions. a lifetime cap, not an annual cap like the fertility assistance benefit that pays for the actual IUI procedure and all of that. when she told me the cap was $15,000, i thought that sounded totally reasonable. until she told me that this round of drugs cost over $9,000. so my $15k cap won't even pay for two full rounds of IUI. i think we will shell out the extra couple of thousand for a second try if we need it, but it's doubtful we'd pay for a 3rd. so our already limited number of tries to give this artificial stuff a shot is even more limited than i thought.

man alive.

so that's where we're at. i got my typical pre-period headache last night, and today is really the day it should come... although i will admit i am still (of course!) holding out hope that it just won't show up. sure, i already paid $300 or something for prescriptions. but seriously... i think i'd deal with that in return for not having to go through this whole process. i guess, as always, there's nothing to do but wait and see.