I missed a day of posting Wednesday due to pain in my left shoulder. For whatever reason the pain in my left shoulder was so great that I can honestly classify it as debilitating. In layman’s terms it hurt like hell. It was strong enough to make me feel sick. It started on Tuesday and grew progressively worse as the day wore on, until it was almost unbearable by the end of the day. I managed to get it under control Tuesday evening, but I spent Wednesday in a weakened state.

Tuesday evening before bed I took some prescription medication I have on hand (leftover from other medical problems) that helped me through Tuesday night. I took a pair of Tylenol PM pills, a muscle relaxant and an anti-inflammatory. The anti-inflammatory is strong enough to knock me on my ass, so it was fine to take it at bedtime. By the time Wednesday morning dawned the pain was back down to a minor ache.

I never lost flexibility in my left shoulder, but moving my arm around gave me all sorts of hell. When I finally got to see my doctor on Wednesday it was normal (or as normal as that joint can get). Range of movement was fine and there was no swelling. My doctor gave me a script to have it Xrayed next Tuesday morning.

I can recount all the times I’ve had pain like that in my life;

• when I broke my right knee as a college freshman,
• when I first had left knee pains back in 2011/2012 that led to its partial replacement in 2012,
• when I was finally driven to have my right knee fully replaced in 2016,
• my left shoulder this month.

I’ve suffered other physical injuries in life, but nothing that basic medicine couldn’t heal and nothing with accompanying memorable pain. My left shoulder ranks right up to the top.

That doctor’s visit led to an interesting conversation about medications. My doctor always checks to make sure I’m still on my core medications, and if I need a refill. That’s when we got to talking about what I wasn’t taking due to the cost to retirees. Jardiance immediately came up because of my borderline type 2 diabetes. I was prescribed that right before I retired in late 2019, and I had enough to last me into February 2020, or two years ago. When it came time for me to refill the co-pay was $500 for 90 days, compared to the original cost of $45 for 90 days when I was still working. I refused to pay that, deciding to stick with metformin due to its low cost. That was also one of the strong motivations to fully clean up my diet. Weight and diet have a major impact on blood sugar, as I’ve seen in my lowering A1C number as well as overall blood sugar.

I have discovered that a lot of the newest prescription drugs are like that. What aggravates me is that is what the major drug companies want to sell, not the older, much lower cost generics. There’s one drug my wife needs that we can’t drop, so our doctor is working to order it from Canada to bring down the cost to something reasonable (if there are any Canadians reading I apologize for taking advantage of their low cost medications).

I’m not throwing our medical system under the bus per se. It has helped my wife tremendously afford her back surgery and rehabilitation. But prescription drug costs have got to be cleaned up.

I’ve been fortunate not to have suffered from debilitating pain in my life. I’m treating Tuesday’s episode for what it is, as a warning to pay attention and not let issues like this slide. I need to be the best my age will allow me to be for many more years to come.