This is a dumb post to say that I'm tired and sick of paying my co-pays for my medications, when the main reason I take them is so that I can go to school and work, to make the money that is eaten up by paying for my medications.
I have chronic migraines. They aren't as bad as some of the tales I've heard, but they are severe – minor ones cause confusion. Major ones are so painful I vomit.
Confusion may not sound bad enough to justify pricy meds, so an example:
During even minor migraines, I am not supposed to drive. I have gone through intersections feeling odd only to realize that the weird niggling was because the light was red. “Why was the light red?” Then in clicks that I've run a stop light, a full minute afterwards. Sometimes I can't even tell if they're migraines or headaches until this happens; I don't get auras.
It's honestly a miracle I haven't killed someone, but how else am I supposed to get to school? There's no bus*, and often there aren't Ubers around my area early in the morning. And once I'm there, it's a $100 ticket to leave my car in the parking lot/garage overnight, (increasing with each violation to up to the revocation of my financial aid) so I drive home because “it won't be that bad, I need to save those tickets for when I have no choice.”
Anyway, meds. I ran the gamut of medications before finally getting approved for botox injections every three months; my copay is a little over $500. They worked like a MIRACLE for about four years, then I started to notice they were getting less effective. When I started to miss classes and work to the point I was getting written up/penalized for missing so much, my doctor suggested Nurtec, a new medication that doesn't have a generic yet. He gave me an entire box of the sample packages, and it lasted about 6 weeks. They worked really well, and unlike Excedrin, were effective even after a migraine was in full swing (also they don't murder my liver and cause rebound headaches).
I cannot afford Nurtec. A pack of eight (a little over a month's worth) is $914, at the cheapest. It took two months of fighting with my insurance for them to cover it. My copay for that same dose is $128. A fraction of the out of pocket cost, so I guess I should be grateful, but I'm not. I make about $300 a week. The Botox and Nurtec alone are are a 1/4th of my income, and I'm on a slew of psychiatric meds that bump it even higher.
Migraines are miserable, but at the end of the day, the reason I need the Nurtec is because I could not hold down a job otherwise. It's not insulin; it's not a drug I need to survive. (People in that situation have it even worse, paying a premium to simply exist.)
To afford the Nurtec, I have to work. To work, I have to take the Nurtec. It's a cycle and I hate it.
*In the interest of being 100% honest, it's possible to take the bus. It requires two different counties' bus systems, has five bus changes and takes a little over eight hours, after adding the wait time between each bus. Also, the buses don't start until 6am, so I couldn't get there early enough to make even a 2pm class. Yes, I was seriously considering this as an option. By car it's about 45 minutes to an hour. Guess what state I live in. Ya get one guess.