Life with a Flare

Disclaimer: This post focuses on the difficulties I had with my insurance company recently to get treatment. And while it is easy to blame only the insurance companies for denial of coverage the drug companies are also at fault here for charging exuberant price and charging different amounts in different countries. Many of my close friends know how frustrating this summer has been. As you can see from my last post I have been flaring since student teaching in the spring. In the past it was hard to control flares because we didn't know the underlying cause/disease and therefor the appropriate treatment. This is no longer the case. I have a diagnosis (plus) and awesome team of doctors who come up with aggressive treatment plans. Theoretically when one treatment starts working and my doctors change the treatment plan I should be able to start the new treatment and hopefully be on my way to feeling better. However when that treatment cost $10,000 or $20,000 and off label it is not th...

So while it has only been 3 months since I last wrote instead of 6 months, a lot of things have happened with my health. After student teaching I refuse to be on prednisone for a little while. That didn't go so well and there was a month full of ulcers. I couldn't talk, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep much. I was not a happy or pleasant human being, which is all the things I hate about being on it. At this point they were running down my throat and I could not swallow. So after a month of this it was time for camp and that meant I needed to be able to talk without wanting to cry and I gave in to the steroids and have been on the highest daily dose yet ever since. Also Behcet's now seems to be the responsible disease for at least this mess. Meanwhile my ability to swallow liquids has also struggled. Most of the time it was pretty solid but more times than I would like I cannot seem to get the coordination down and it seems to go down the wrong pipe and cause ...