So cycle day 14 brings the quest to actually acquire the drugs in my possession. I have to admit, I put it off as long as I could because I am still waiting for them to say "You are too old, go away. Your body is most certainly NOT a temple let alone an incubator for a little life. Go home!"
But they haven't. They continue to insist I have a chance at this. On Monday, if you recall, I had a very stressful day pricing everything. While it was upsetting and frustrating, I HIGHLY recommend this. Here's why. For the past how many years, they've always recommended Rosemont Pharmacy so of course I wasn't surprised to see it on my list of places to try. Their price for Gonal-F? $810 per vial. I need 5 vials for a total of $4050. Cornerstone in Willow Grove, the company I chose to go with? $384 a vial after they applied some sort of rebate (they applied for me and gave me the after rebate price). That totals $1920 for a savings of $2130! That's huge!
The other thing Cornerstone did was, they mentioned that cetrotide could be taken in place of Ganilrelex for a savings of $106.50 overall. So I called the nurses and asked if that was OK and it was - hooray!
The other good news is that I did indeed qualify for one of the Compassionate Care programs and they gave me 50% off the price paid for gonal-f and cetrotide. So take that off the prices listed above and I ended up with a total bill of $4300 instead of the $6000 ($7300 if I had gone with Rosemont) I was looking at before I started pricing. So do that if you can. These are all the cash out of pocket no insurance coverage prices by the way. I can't tell you what it looks like when insurance covers some or part.
My next challenge was paying for them. I had maxed out my credit card to pay for the IVF services last week and it was a race to see how quickly they would post the transaction my account, I could pay that electronically and set my balance back to 0. By 11:30am, my balance was back to 0 and I could call the pharmacy! It seems like everything is starting to fall into place now, and I am catching some of those breaks...like Compassionate Care taking pity on me and processing my application in 3 hours instead of 3-5 days.
I did have a back up plan. The worse case scenario is I would take the money out of my account in cash and drive the 2 hours to Cornerstone. But a) who wants to drive around with $4300 cash in their purse, and b) I wanted the credit card points. If I have to go through all this, I'm at least going to get an airline ticket to someplace warm and sunny out of it! ha ha ha
So after running to the UPS store to fax in the script, my Compassionate Care card, and my insurance card (there were three things that they thought they could get covered in my insurance - the antibiotic, the immunity rejection drug medol and the esterase -estrogen- that all have uses outside of fertility) and several back and forth calls, I am now patiently waiting for my big expensive box of drugs to arrive.
I am supose to start Friday. Again, I am compartmentalizing the ideas of all those shots, of what if this doesn't work, how many embryos to transfer, will I even get enough eggs to make embryos.. If I think too long on any of those, I start to get a little crazy. I noticed yesterday during my walk, that I made a conscious decision NOT to think about anything IVF related. I needed a break, and frankly, I think breaks away are good for me. I will take each day, and it's decisions, as they come.
And so ends cd 14.
No comments:
Post a Comment