Bye

Remember the injection I described that was administered to me twice already? It's just a stop-gap solution. It is supposed to be replaced with an injection of some other medicine, which is much more potent but is horribly expensive. However the health insurance is supposed to pay for it. In order for this to happen, the doctors have to send a request to the bureaucrats of the state-run insurance. The said bureaucrats gather once a month to discuss the applications and, if an application is approved, they notify the applicant. The whole process can take 1-2 months, thus the need for the stop-gap solution.

If this whole process looks way too cumbersome to you, keep in mind that it was made much more efficient recently. The application process is electronic, done by the doctors, and the patient is notified by phone or SMS. Before (I've undergone this procedure for my mother), the patient had to stand in humongous lines and apply manually, then occasionally check whether the application was approved.

Since the date of my next injection is approaching, I have an idea. Before, I had to go to the 8^th floor of the hospital where I am being treated, wait for the doctor to become available and write a prescription, trot down to the pharmacy on the 1^st floor, optionally scour other pharmacies if the one at the hospital doesn't have it, buy the medicine, and climb back to the 8^th floor to have it administered. It would be much more efficient, if my personal physician (who has a practice nearby) could write the prescription, then I buy it at the nearby pharmacy, and then I travel to the hospital where I am being treated to have it administered on the 8^th floor. Provided, of course, that my personal physician has the authority to prescribe such a medicine - so I visit him to ask.

Turns out, he does. Yay! But while digging into various information systems to see what I have been prescribed before, when exactly, when it has been administered, and so on, he discovers an interesting tidbit of information. "So, why aren't you being administered the more potent stuff?", asks he. "Because the bureaucrats from the health insurance haven't approved it yet," is my obvious answer. "Uhm," muses the doc, "it says here that it has been approved on the 1^st of December - nearly a month ago." WTF?! Why hasn't anybody notified me, as they were supposed to do?! Well, because it's a state insurance run by bureaucrats, obviously. Duh! We agree that I should visit him again one day before the date on which the injection is to be administered, so that he can write the prescription. Then I can buy the medicine and go to the hospital to have it administered.

I leave the doctor's practice but have a nagging idea. This isn't aspirin - it is some kind of special medicine that is horrendously expensive and needs special approval. Will the pharmacy have it available? I better check.

To no one's surprise, the pharmacist tells me that, no, they don't have it, of course. Can they order it? Yes, and she'll do so immediately, but despite the fact that there's more than a week till the date on which it has to be administered, with all the holidays around the end of the year, there are only 2 workdays left and there's no guarantee that it will arrive on time. She takes my phone number and promises to notify me when it arrives. I warn her that I'll ask my oncologist whether the injection can be delayed by a few days and, if not, I'll have to start scouring other pharmacies and won't buy it from her. She's fine with that.

I get home and quickly fire an e-mail to one of the oncologists - the younger and much more helpful one, who also regularly reads and responds to my e-mails. He answers that about a week of delay isn't a problem. Still, things will be pretty tight, because the next injection is supposed to be administered 28 days after the previous one, but because these guys work only Tuesdays and Thursdays, and because of the holidays, my appointed next injection date is already a few days past that.

Fortunately, the next day the pharmacist calls me and tells me that the medicine has arrived. Yay, I guess. So, I jot down in my calendar to go to my personal physician on 5^th of January for a prescription, then go to the pharmacy to get the medicine, then on the next day go to the hospital to have it administered. I'll keep you posted.