Lupron (FINALLY)
Aaron’s first Lupron shot finally came!! It took us A WHILE to get it approved but I was so excited and overjoyed to finally give it to him. At this point, he’s 14 and a full blown hormones screaming teenager. so I am hoping that his hormone suppressant also suppresses his attitude!!
We gave him the shot while on FaceTime with my bff Cristin who is a pharmacy tech and is trained at giving shots. She works for CVS and is actually giving the COVID 19 shot out now. So she walked us through the whole thing – how to prepare the shot, where to give it to him, how to do it, etc. Which was good because I have certainly never given anyone a shot before now and I am going to have to get good at this because he gets one every month and there’s no way he is going to self-administer these.
I was super over the moon when I finally got to hear about the cost of these shots because I’d heard everything between $1400 per shot and $10. For something Aaron needs monthly for the next 5+ years of his life, $1400 was pretty steep. Lets be honest. $1400 just once is pretty steep!!
But one of the healthcare billing ladies at our endocrinologist suggested to check out this web site and see about getting a discount from the manufacture. Once upon a time, this type search had made our $600 epic-pen totally free so I was more than willing to check it out.
This phenomenal little card brought my co-pay from $180 per month to $0 per month. I don’t know why it was $0 but it was and I was absolutely over the moon about it. You can check out this discount card here;
Having support from the manufacture really encouraged me because I’m just a lower middle class mom trying to do the best that I can to support my kid. $1400 a month is insane. Even $180 a month with my really good insurance would not necessarily be feasible. Maybe once every 3 months but every month, that would really be hard to do financially. Every step along this way, I’ve been warning Aaron that I wasn’t sure if we could afford it, and if it “was a billion dollars” that we would have to look into some other option (there really aren’t other options…… but I was determined to have an answer somehow).
About 3 days after we gave him his first shot, I got a letter from my insurance company letting me know that the specialty pharmacy we had signed up with to get his Lupron won’t be covered after 2/22/21 (which is before dose 2). They recommended moving the script to CVS or Walgreens — which leads me to wonder why we didn’t just call it in to CVS or Walgreens in the first place — but the doctor made that decision, not me. I imagine if we are allowed to administer it at home that we should be able to get it from a local pharmacy instead of having it shipped and all.
We shall see — I’ll be moving the script to CVS this month and hopefully get everything we need for it taken care of pretty easily. Cristin says the coupon will work over there too, so I’m hopeful that this doesn’t really change the cost much – if at all.