Thursday, 28 July 2011

My Expensive New Meds!

This morning I took my very first half of a Lycodern tablet, and it was all hidden inside a huge lump of dogfood, so that made it really yummy.  The lump of dogfood had to be big because the pills are big, and even half of a pill is big, so that's the reason why.  The pills I'm taking are 500 mg, and they cost Mom $6.20 each, but she only had to buy 10 of them so far.  At least they didn't cost $7.50 each, like the price we saw on the internet.  I get to take another half of a pill with my supper, so that will be fun.

The nice pharmacist told Mom that she shouldn't touch the pills with her bare hands, and that is because she is not supposed to get the stuff they're made of inside her own body.  It's only supposed to be inside MY body.  So Mom put on some rubber gloves and split all the pills last night, and then this morning she figured out a clever way to get one inside a dogfood meatball without actually touching the pill.

Anyway, what this drug does is it destroys part of my adrenal gland, and it's the part that makes cortisol.  So after that, when the tumor on my pituitary gland tells my adrenal glad to make more cortisol than I really need, my adrenal gland won't be able to do that.  And that's a good thing.

But the tricky part is that we have to make sure that just the right amount of my adrenal gland gets destroyed by the pills and not too much of it, because if we go too far, then I will have Addison's Disease instead of Cushing's Disease.  This is all very confusing, but I'm just telling you what I understand about it. Also I wonder if all those old-time doctors like Dr. Cushing and Dr. Addison were proud to have a nasty disease named after them.  Oh well, I guess we can't ask them because they are dead now.

So now Mom has to watch me for the smallest sign that I am not wanting to gobble all my food down instantly at every meal, which would mean that it's time to do that $250 test to find out if enough of my adrenal gland is gone, and I can start being on a maintenance dose of the Lycodern stuff.  And when I'm on a maintenance dose, I will only have to get it maybe a couple of times a week, and I won't be drinking water all the time, and my hair will grow back.  But not for four or six months.

So okay, that's all for now.  Except I will just say that Mom has decided she might be able to afford to buy dogfood after all, even when she has to pay for such expensive medicine for me!

No comments:

Post a Comment