Well, as many of you know, we have been struggling with getting the correct amount of insulin from our provider and our insurance. To recap, the endo kept writing the prescription as a range, and the pharmacy kept calculating the minimum amount as the refill amount. i.e. the Scrip said 30-65 units per day, and of course the Pharmacy refills for 30 units per day, which isn’t much when your growing son is eating 5 meals a day to bulk up for baseball…
Well after a heart to heart with the endo, we finally got our prescription sorted out and this is what 3 months of insulin looks like.
But—I am shocked your oharmacist felt free to fill the script that way. We have had range-defined scripts for both insulin and test strips for years, and all the pharmacies we have dealt with (including mail order, so probably 5 different pharmacies) always used the high end of the range.
Just lucky I guess. We had the last pharmacy, which is also an ex-pharmacy call our physicians office and then hand us 1 vial of insulin for a month. We then went to the current mail order pharmacy, and they sent us 3 boxes of penfills for three months.
In the ex-pharmacy case they also didn’t auto renew our scrip despite us signing up, so when my wife and I were both travelling we lost 6 days of time where they said they could only time our prescription by when we picked it up, not when we called to fill it. Thus loosing even more insulin by delaying the next month’s refill.
Needless to say we ran through a bunch of our Canadian insulin and fortuitously one of our members sent us some that helped as well, even though that was not the intent. It was to test out a different brand. The last three months have easily been the most frustrating since diagnosis.
67~100 units per day would provide this number of vials.
I agree with the Pharmacist that a range is just not appropriate. It is not the place of the Pharmacist to decide how much medication to provide. It is the job of the Doctor to provide specific instructions to the Pharmacist which can be filled without ambiguity.
Nice. I find just being extraordinarily blunt and specific with my docs office to be very helpful… “please write prescription for novolog for 60 units / day. Please make an internal note in my chart that I don’t actually use anywhere near that much.”
What worries me is if I was ever incapacitated and they were looking at my chart and dosing my insulin according to it at a hospital or something… so I do insist on them making “internal notes” on my chart about how much I actually use… and then prescribing much more…
I strongly recommend a specific amount on all prescriptions… anything else has been a no-go for me. “Use 80 units per day” or “use to test blood sugar 12 times per day” for example.
The range can be a problem. Caremark doesn’t even accept prescriptions written that way, for me at least
Don’t worry, when you are incapacitated in the hospital on a dextrose IV, and they don’t even know that your sugar is shooting to the moon, they will use a sliding scale and determine that you only need 3 units. /s
