While I don’t take a lot of medications, I do take more now than I did before. I remember when just taking one daily medication seemed like a lot to me. Now I have 2 daily medications, one of which I take 3 times a day, plus some weekly and sporadic ones. I use a pill reminder app so it’s not a big deal for me to remember to take them and I seem to have a good system down for staying on top of things. The only thing that I’m not always able to be on top of is ordering refills.
For some of my regular medications, you can’t order a refill until you are almost out of the prescription. This isn’t always a huge deal since I do have to go in for my prescriptions more often than I can get them mailed to me (plus I’m nervous about using mail order after one was almost lost in the mail). So I just have to order the refill through my insurance app and it’s usually able to be picked up within a day or two. I just have to prioritize going in to get them since I usually am ordering a refill when I have less than a week left before I need it.
About a month and a half ago, I started to take injections to help with my weight loss. Right before I did my last shot of the injection pen I had, I noticed I wasn’t able to order a refill until the next day. That would mean I would have 6 days between when I ordered the refill and when I would need it. This seemed ok to me and worked out with the timing of another refill I had to get that I always have to go to the pharmacy to pick up as it is considered a controlled substance. So I ordered both refills and figured I’d go to pick them up later in the week.
Then the next day, I got an alert that the injection pen was delayed and wouldn’t be available to pick up for 3 business days. I figured that would be ok and I could give it an extra day and go to pick it up on Saturday after work. I didn’t need the new injection pen until Monday so I wasn’t worried about getting it on Saturday.
When I got to the pharmacy on Saturday, I still hadn’t received an alert that the injection pen was available, but since I had gotten the alert that it was going to be available after 3 business days, I thought maybe I wasn’t supposed to get a new one. But that wasn’t the case.
I went to check in to get my prescriptions (which is how I always have to do things), and they told me that the injection pens weren’t there. They had a shortage and didn’t know when they would be coming in. They couldn’t tell me much more than that, so I waited for my other prescription to be ready so I could at least pick up that one.
And when I finally got to pick up the other one, they only gave me part of what I was supposed to receive. Typically, I get a 3-month refill each time. This time, I only got 30 days. I asked if there was a mistake or something because this was my last refill and my doctor wasn’t going to see me for 3 months, and they said that medication had a shortage so they could only give me 1 month at a time. But they did offer to send a note to my doctor to add additional refills so I could come back each month to get another 30 days of medication.
There wasn’t much else I could do since a shortage isn’t something my hospital controls. But as soon as I got home, I emailed the doctor from bariatric medicine regarding the injection pens. I don’t know if I have to start at the lowest dosage again or if there is a different plan. I also have no idea when I will be able to get that refilled. Right now, all I can do is call the pharmacy each day to see if their shipment included it. At least that saves me time from driving there each day, but I’m hoping that they will get it in soon.
I’m not sure why there is a shortage of the medication I could only get a 30-day refill for. It’s something that I’ve been taking for a while and isn’t newly popular or anything like that. For the injection pen, I know that because a lot of people have been hearing about using it for weight loss, it has rapidly gained popularity and that could be the reason for the shortage. And I know that there are people who use those for much more serious reasons than what I use it for, so if there is a limited supply it makes sense that those go to the people who are using it for things such as diabetes.
It is frustrating since I don’t know what the new plan will be or if this will be a frequent problem when I need refills. Maybe my doctor will allow me to request a refill sooner so there is more time for shipments to come in. And even though I know these injection pens have been helping me a lot, I’m not going to use lack of availability as an excuse. It might be harder to stay on the path I’ve been able to do the last month and a half, but I’m going to try my best. And hopefully, soon I’ll be able to get back to using those injections to help me to continue to make progress.
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