Thursday and Relaxing

It has been a wild week. I hope to take it easy today. Bill's service is at 10:00 AM tomorrow. Leslie will do the service and I will read the obit. I will pick up Bob at 9:15 in the morning. He is going with me. I hope our congregation comes out for the service. Bill has been a faithful participant for 25 years. Phyllis can't attend. She works four days a week and Friday is one of those days.

I didn't sleep all that well. Missy was restless and she kept me awake from time to time.  Still, it was nearly 5:00 AM when I finally got up.

I notice Missy wet on the bathmat I keep under her litter box again. She does that at least two times a week. She just doesn't make it into the litter box from time to time and hits the mat. She is fifteen years old so I cut her some slack.  I am doing some laundry...mostly towels and those mats.... so that should be o.k. I had one more old mat to put under it. Bob gave me that one when he recently bought a new bathmat.  The new litter I bought this week at Dollar General doesn't track as bad as the old stuff  I have been having to use since my surgery. I am not supposed to lift over 15 pounds. Most of that stuff is forty pounds. This is ten pounds.

I will go to Joplin for our Mission Center meeting by myself on Saturday. Leslie and John will be at Roaring River camping from Saturday through Tuesday and Phyllis works on Saturdays. Karan is meeting with her sister on Saturday that she has not seen in years. So I will go alone. I have to be there at 9:15.

I will take Juanita to see her heart doctor there in Independence next Wednesday on the 25th. Then on the 30th, Leslie will take me to Kansas City for my one month checkup on my surgery.

Yesterday while in Independence I asked the pharmacist at Walgreen's what the cost of that little tube of estrogen cream they gave me to use there at the hospital would cost if I refilled the prescription. She said it would be $310.

Talk about a racket! The pharmaceutical companies know most people have insurance so they jack up the price on those small tubes...and nearly everything else in prescriptions too. I don't have a prescription drug insurance since I only take one $10.00 prescription and one $20.60 prescription and I just refill them every three months. I could not justify the expense of the prescription drug plan.  So I didn't sign up for it.

I checked with the Medicine Shoppe here in Coffeyville and their cost would be $300. so I will just not refill the cream.  I will just use the gel. I get that from a compounding pharmacy in Lenexa and it is $65. a month. I can manage that. I understand there are some cancer drugs that cost thousands of dollars and many of us low income folks cannot afford to even treat the disease.

Juanita, who is nearly blind, has four eye drops she has to use daily. They are tiny little vials and they cost $100 each.  She is a 97 year old woman and she has to pay the $100 each  and that cost is WITH the prescription drug plan.  Disgusting!

The government needs to do some serious regulation of pharmaceutical companies.

More later...

This is a photo of the family of my friend, Bill.  He's the man with white hair. He will be very much missed. The pretty white haired woman is his wife, Carol. The other younger two adults are his children with some of the grandchildren.



I was getting ready to take my shower and noticed a swollen red place on the side of my right knee. I had first noticed it when I put my jeans on this morning. It had a small black thing sticking out of it with a hard head on it. I pulled the black thing out, put some antibiotic ointment on it and a band aid.

It itched and burned most of the day. Now it looked very angry. I put my clothes back on and went over to the Urgent Care about four blocks away. They were still open. The nurse looked at it and saw how swollen and red it was and prescribed an antibiotic which I had to go to Walmart to fill.

When I got home I took my shower and Missy and I watched a documentary about World War 2 and then at 9:30, we both went on to bed.