Not a good day yesterday. Problems ranged from a malfunction in the garage door to Pat running out of "N" insulin. Luckily, I spoke to darling daughter, Ellen, and she suggested it could be bought over the counter. I didn't think so, but found it can be. Get this: Walgreens's gave me of price of FIFTY-ONE DOLLARS for the tiny vial (holds about a half teaspoon) and I got it at Wal-Mart for twenty three.
Pat was able to tell me what to do about the garage door and the other problems--oh, yes, there were others--more or less resolved themselves. I'm coming up out of my slump now and feeling better.
8 comments:
I hope your Tuesday has been better.
The availability of insulin over the counter does not surprise me ... we gave our late cat, Hobbes, a daily shot for several years before he finally checked out. The price, however, does shock me; even the lower price you quoted sounds really high. Maybe we were giving a different kind to the cat. I'm sure it was much cheaper.
Hey - you might try the cat version - probably the same stuff ... or close enough?
Jim, I went back to Walgreen's and asked about the discrepancy in price. The pharmacist told me it was probably because Wal-Mart got a better contract with the drug company. In other words, what you pay has no relationship to what it costs to make, etc.--it all depends what the corporate shills can get out of their customers.
Anon., I would give your father the cat version, only I'd get sick of hearing all that meowing.
I hope there hasn't been any misunderstanding from my comment, above. Our cat did, in fact, get human insulin. I don't believe they make veterinary insulin. Our cat got something called "Humulin-R." (Mimi was talking about N-type, and that might have something to do with the price ... I don't know.) And now that I think of it, we might have paid something like $25/vial. The cost was not really a factor, though, because his daily shot was so small a volume that the vial lasted many days. (The vet also said we should re-use the syringe/needle, too, until the needle started losing its sharpness.)
I suppose the dose is probably more or less proportional to body weight, so a ten-pound cat probably gets about one-fifteenth as much as a 150-pound person, give or take an additional factor for the severity of the disease.
You'd think that shooting a cat who has all his claws would be a blood-donation adventure, but not so, with this one at least. We shot him in the loose skin at the nape of the neck, pulling it up for that purpose, and he seldom seemed to notice the needle at all.
Mimi, I'm sure you're right about the store-to-store price discrepancy, too. How often do we see the same thing with other sorts of goods?
Mimi - Note to Self:
1. Reuse the needles
2. "Shoot" Pat in the nape of the neck
Yours truly,
Anon
Jim, yes, I think the "human vs. cat" insulin is probably one and the same; it seems likely. BTW, how is your cat doing?
Anon, Ha, ha, very funny.
Well, Hobbes was the diabetic, and he died several years ago. We have another cat now, Tybalt, and he's quite well, physically, at least. Mentally ... like most cats, he's a little bit of a sociopath.
Diabetes is difficult to manage in a cat, because you can't get multiple blood sugar measurements per day, as people with diabetes do. So, it's a "guess-and-by-golly" sort of thing. About a year after we started treating him, we found out the dose was a little too large when he "crashed" one night and very nearly died; he was seizing and then unconscious, and I sat up most of the night with him, rubbing Karo syrup on his gums with my finger. He then did pretty well for a couple of years until one day he had more seizures; we took him to the vet and he couldn't stop them, and advised us that the cat was finished. So we had the vet put him down.
Not too long after that, I found out that a woman who works at the day job was also shooting her cat. So I guess it isn't as unusual as I thought.
Yes, I think it's pretty common and probably for similar reasons that it has increased in the human population: Too many calories of the wrong kind.
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