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Saturday, October 8, 2011

Abilify Saga

Not too long after we lost Tippy Toes, DH ran out of Abilify samples that he had gotten from his pdoc.  When he only had a couple of days worth of pills left, he called to get more, and they were out of samples.  So they gave him a prescription to bring to the pharmacy.

Unfortunately the pharmacy informed us that insurance would not pay for the pills, as the price comes out to around $15-20 PER PILL and of course they didn't want to shell that out.  And at $600 per month, there was no way that we could pay for it ourselves....DH's pdoc informed us that he was going to appeal that decision. In the meantime, we just had to wait and see.....

So there we sat.  The pdoc had reduced DH's Seroquel and also his Lithium, in response to DH being on Abilify.  And it had all been working out so good, he was getting out of bed, and what's even better than that, the Abilify had done something to make him less focused on himself and his own wants and needs and more focused on me and us.  And that was huge.  But with no Abilify and less Lithium and Seroquel, things got weird.

DH brought a bunch of stuff to the pawn shop to get money to buy fast food.  He even pawned an antique rifle that his friend Jim (the one who stayed at our house for so long, but who has helped us immensely) owned, it had belonged to Jim's grandfather, and DH pawned it to go to Dairy Queen.

He went to the liquor store and bought beer.

He started laying huge guilt trips on me when I didn't have (or didn't want to part with) the money that he wanted for (candy, ice cream, etc). 

When he had started the Abilify, he had started, for the first time, to check his blood sugar and he had started drinking diet pop (with the added motivation of the possibility of losing manly parts if he didn't).  But when the Abilify stopped, this stopped, too.

It was all very frustrating, because I just kept thinking "I cannot go through this again.  I am just not capable of doing this again."  And DH knew something was wrong (in moments of lucidity), but he was powerless to stop it, and except for those moments of lucidity, he did not see how bad things got so quickly.

It was a very scary time, topping off the loss of Tippy Toes, and very painful to me.

When we got the word that the appeal to the insurance company had been granted, it was a huge relief.  That was just two days ago.  DH had been off of Abilify and on lowered doses of Lithium and Seroquel for about 2 weeks.  He told me that he had even been thinking about trying to get a credit card(!) during that time.

Despite the fact that DH had made the decision(s) to pawn those items while he was "even less right than usual", I was not willing or able to help him unpawn them.  I have had it with bailing him out (at least directly out of my pocket), and I'm done with it.  He wasn't happy with that, but too bad.  He, of course, in his deluded state, had been sure that he could make enough money to get the items out of the pawn shop, and when he started to come back to reality a little, he realized he had made a huge mistake.  He had to come up with nearly $500 to get the stuff back.  Luckily for him (but not really lucky for me so much), just in the nick of time, he found out about a program that the place where he works offers--he could take out a $500 loan, no credit check required, and they would take $25 out of every paycheck until it was paid off.  So that is what he did. 

I'm so very tired of this pawn shop stuff.  I sat him down and we wrote up a contract that states that he will not bring any items (no matter who they belong to) to the pawnshop without talking it over with me first.  And he signed it.  I guess whether he sticks to it is dependent on where his mental health is at any given time, but usually, for DH, no matter his mental state, a promise is a promise, and breaking it is a big deal.  So I'm hoping, but being realistic about it, too.

The one good thing that came out of this (if you can call it good) is that for all the times DH has wondered if maybe he should just go off all of his meds because he really was a lot better when he was off them, well, this little experience showed us how things could go bad really fast without proper medication.

2 comments:

Miz Kizzle said...

5hat story is just plain pathetic. Does Jim know your DH pawned his rifle?

Robin said...

Oh man this must be horribly difficult for you!

Have you thought of trying EMPowerplus for DH? I have Bipolar Disorder and am amazed at how well it actually works. I don't think it's available by prescription (unless you can convince pdoc to prescribe it) and it works out to about $150/month. A lot, yes, but stability is worth it for me. It even worked for my boyfriend's depression. Just a thought, no side effects (except nausea in the beginning, it passes) and works within a week.