Category Archives: Health and Fitness

Cheap Meds

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a nasal allergy sufferer. Without my meds, I get sinus headaches, stuffy nose, and on worse days, runny nose, sneezing, and really bad headaches. I take rhinocort, which is a prescription medicine that runs $25 for about a month’s supply. I also take Alavert D-12, a 12-hour medicine which combines loratadine, the active ingredient in Claritin, and pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed. Loratadine controls most allergy symptoms, while pseudoephedrine controls sinus congestion.

Alavert D-12 runs $15.99 for a 24-dose pack, or $0.67 per dose. Each dose has the equivalent day of two 30mg Sudafed tablets and one 5mg Loratadine tablet. For a while, I thought this was the best deal I could get, combining two medicines I needed into one pill. That is, until my last doctor’s appointment, where I found out that I could get generic pseudoephedrine and generic loratadine for much cheaper than even the cheapest store brands, at the medical center’s in-house pharmacy. How much cheaper?

Well, today I picked up a bottle of 100 “SudoGest” tablets, equivalent to Sudafed, for $1.77. Yep. Not a typo. One dollar and seventy-seven cents. That works out to $0.02 per pill. Compare that to name-brand Sudafed, which, at best is $7.99 for a 48 pill pack or $0.17 per pill. Even Walgreens’ store brand, Wal-phed, is at best $8.99 for a 96 pill pack, or $0.09 per pill. Dag, yo! And I picked up two boxes of generic 24-hour loratadine, $4.99 for each 30-pill pack, or $0.16 per pill. Compare that to name-brand Claritin, 30 pills for $23.99 or $0.79 each, or Walgreens’ brand Wal-itin, 90 pills for $19.99 or $0.22 per pill. Boo-yah! In addition to the price advantage, separating the two medicines means that I can take the allergy medicine every day, and then take the nasal congestion medicine only when I need it.

Is it sad that I get so excited about things like this?

Fear, Guilt and Dental Floss

Do you like the Dentist? I do. I love the way that my teeth feel after they’ve been cleaned. I currently am wearing Invisalign provided by the experts at Invisalign – Damon Orthodontics Spokane, which is why I make regular visits to the dentist to get my mouth cleaned once in every two months. I don’t even mind the scraping and poking of the… umm… scraping and poking tool. And I kind of like the ‘stuffing your mouth full of film’ x-ray part. So, minus the drilling and the pulling, I consider the dentist to be a pretty cool person.

I have found that most people dislike going to the dentist, even despite that cool dental procedure called gum contouring I have just discovered. I’m not sure why. Perhaps they hate keeping their mouths open for so long. Or the hurting of the dental tools. Or the sound of the drills. Probably all of the above.

I suspect, however, that there may be another anxiety that comes into play during a trip to the dentists in Sydney. It comes in the form of a question (perhaps from the all too perky Hygenist). So, have you been flossing?

You sit, pinned to the chair by a heavy lead apron, unable to answer. She glares down at you under the yellow light of the adjustable lamp… Do you tell the truth? “No, I have not, in fact, been flossing. Which ring of Hell has been reserved for me?” Or do you lie through your teeth (no pun intended)?? “Of course I’ve been flossing! Can’t you tell?”

The pressure, the guilt! There’s no where to turn and it’s impossible to change the subject.

So, do YOU floss? ummm. ahhhh… How about them Red Sox, eh?

Good Plans and Bad Plans

Good Plan:

Our web hosting provider, ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/***, just upped disk capacity and bandwidth across all of their plans. We now have 1.5 gigabytes of storage space instead of 550 megabytes. Woo-hoo! It’s a good thing, too, because our photo albums were taking up just about 500 megabytes of that space. This should keep us happy for quite a while. And they were able to offer this upgrade without any price increases! Yay Site5!

Bad Plan:

Our recently-new HMO, ***Tufts Health Plan|http://www.tuftshealthplan.com/***, on the other hand, has changed their prescription drug plans. One of the allergy medicines I take, ***Rhinocort Aqua|http://www.rhinocortaqua.com/c/index_nf.asp***, was just moved from Tier 1 (least expensive) to Tier 2 (second most expensive). This means it now costs $25 instead of $15. Unfortunately, there are no Tier 1 options that are equivalent to Rhinocort Aqua, so I am kind of stuck in that respect. Add to this the fact that ***Allegra-D|http://www.allegra.com/***, which I used to take, was raised to a Tier 3, which means $40. When that happened, I switched to ***Alavert-D|http://www.alavert.com/***, a generic brand of ***Claritin|http://www.claritin.com/***, which works just as well as Allegra and only costs $15 for 24 tablets. (Both Claritin and Alavert are available without a prescription, as well, so I never have to worry about getting the prescription renewed, at least for that half of my drugs.)

Boo to Tufts Health Plan! And, I suppose, boo to allergies for making me have to take this stuff!

the Mutiny of #17

Today is a sad sad day in Rhistory. For the first time in 24 years one of my beloved body parts has decided to jump ship. Mutiny, if you will. Luckily he could not convince any of the others to join him.

Peter’s entry {see below} tells the truth. I had tooth #17 {Lower left wisdom tooth} extracted today. He was causing me much pain and the oral surgen told me that wisdom teeth aren’t even used for chewing! What?! Pull that sucker out then!

I am just afraid that other parts of me may become dissatisfied with their current habitat. Will others choose to leave as well. Perhaps my spleen? or my pancreas? or my big toe? Let’s hope not.

but he had an accent!

and an M.D. but he was no Luka Kovatch. I spent another evening at the Beverly Hospital Emergency Room. While cooking what would have been a very delicious supper I made a nice clean cut in my left middle finger. It wasn’t deep but the blood was definately making a run for it.

Peter took me to the hospital and without too much delay I was admitted to the fast-track. My er doc was of middle eastern decent and had a nice accent. He “glued” my wound up (with something called Dermabond) and left to get some paperwork for me. While he was out my body decided that it was no longer in “emergency” mode and that it would be okay to pass out. So i fainted. The nice nurse put a cold, wet cloth on my head and offered to wheel me out to the car. Fortunately I got better pretty quickly and was able to walk out on my own power. Alls well that ends well, don’cha know?

Mid o’ the week to ya!

Howdy folks, it’s Wednesday! The week is halfway through. Hooray!

On Monday I visited my allergist for some more testing, since the first time I went I forgot to stop taking Claritin. Oops! In any case, they ran subdermal tests for treatable allergies – 13 needles total, each one containing a moderate dose of an allergen for which there is a pharmacological treatment. These include cat and dog allergens, dust mites, mold, pollen, as well as trees, grass, weeds, etc.

I came back with five positives out of the 13 tests: general trees, maple trees, birch trees, grasses, and weeds. This was interesting news, as I had previously thought I was allergic to cats and dogs. But their test showed that I had no reaction at all to those allergens! In any case, the tree, grass, and weed allergies hit me in three out of the four seasons, so the only season where I’m safe from allergies is winter. The doc prescribed me Allegra-D and Rhinocort Aqua – the former an antihistamine to block my main allergy symptoms, and the latter a corticosteroid to help keep my nose from being irritated by allergens and other airborne particles.

I’m looking forward to enjoying the summer without allergies. 🙂

In other news, Becky has started her internship at Strawbery Banke. It sounds like she’s enjoying it so far! She has her own little research area set up and she is starting to get busy with projects.

In two weeks Becky and I will be heading out to Portland, Oregon for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. CBD is sending me and another colleague out there to take some classes and learn new techniques, and they were gracious enough to allow our spouses to come along for the trip. It should be an educational time for me, and a fun time for both of us. We hope to also spend some time with Jackie and the rest of the Ways while we are out there. 🙂

Finally, I hope you are all following along with our newly-created Scrabble This! blog.

🙂