kimberlysteele | Insulin Prices Are Skyrocketing

Just as I learn I might be diabetic

My husband is in his early 60s and he is a type 2 diabetic. Obviously this is not to be construed as medical advice, but on days when he does yard work or strenuous fixer upper stuff around the house, he often can skip his insulin because his blood sugar acts like a normal person's. He has also had some luck controlling his blood sugar spikes with amla, otherwise known as Indian gooseberry. He takes a supplement I order from eBay. He's running out of insulin now and we can't afford it if it is $500 a box (we're lower middle class and just barely scraping by) we will have no choice but to try to control his diabetes without insulin. He has also had good results from taking white willow (B. alba) 2 capsules every evening to prevent diabetic eye swelling and headache. Another thing that really seems to lower blood sugar is well-crafted, homemade food (typical American peasant fare like roasted potatoes and bean soup) because of its etheric richness. Diabetes, I believe, is a product of etheric starvation. My husband is addicted to heavily processed food and does not cook. I don't have time to be his full-time chef, plus he eats addictive things whether or not I cook. I believe if I cooked everything he ate, his diabetes wouldn't be nearly as bad. During the lockdown last year when I was making all of our meals and when he ran out of processed foods to eat, he went for several weeks with no insulin.

Does either of you have health insurance? If not, see if your state will let you buy insulin without a prescription, and then try the cheaper insulin that you suck up out of the bottle (as opposed to those expensive pens). Your doctor can also prescribe the cheap stuff if he’s willing to do so. If you have insurance, have your doctor find out which brand the insurance sells cheapest. There’s usually quite a variation in price between brands. (The pharmacist won’t know the cost, any more than you do, until she “runs the prescription,” which can cause a lot of back-and-forth with the doctor, so have him find out the prices to start with.). Good luck and let us know how it goes. And don’t forget Gofundme.

—Lady Grapedropper

What kind insulin costs $500? In my area, goodrx shows CVS pharmacy sells lispro (Humalog) for $44.60. Is the $500 for one of those basal insulins that also includes ingredients that slow the stomach and stimulate the pancreas at meal time? I understand those are very expensive. I've been seeing some of them advertised a lot lately.

Is Indian gooseberry something you can raise in your garden? How about the white willow? (and what is the B of B. alba? I'm thinking the willows I know are Salix.

World-wide, diabetes 2 is becoming so common!

My bad, I meant Salix. Betula is birch.

Unfortunately, whatever insulin the people in the videos are getting costs the moon -- I'm sure they'd buy it for $44.60 if they were given a choice.

Indian gooseberry is tropical, so I suppose you can grow it if you live in the tropics! Otherwise, I have not looked into trying to grow it indoors... If anyone tries it, let me know!

Jerusalem artichokes or Sunchokes, are supposed to be good for controlling diabetes. Maybe something to consider for your garden?

https://www.survivorjane.com/general-survival-information/147-sun-and-artichoke-survival-insulin-for-the-diabetic

https://www.topinambur-manufaktur.de/diabetes

https://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-food/spotlight-sunchokes-diabetic-friendly-root-vegetable/

Joy Marie

Thanks for this! I have eaten sunchokes before but I have not grown them. They are very tasty, plus they're a hardy perennial because they are the sunflower family. I'll definitely start growing them this year.

I replied already, but maybe I'm misunderstanding what a box of insulin is. It is a box of several vials of insulin? --'cause where I quoted a price above it was for a single vial. How long does a box last?

It depends on how many “units “ (drops) of insulin the patient needs daily. Pens contain 300 units, I forget how many units are in a vaul.

—Her Grapeship

It's five pens to a box.

How long a box lasts depends entirely on how much insulin you need, which varies a lot from person to person. If you look at the videos, you see a good snapshot of the range: The mom whose T1D kid is on a low-carb diet goes through one box a month. The 24-year-old T1D man uses four boxes a month. There may be people who need more.

If you're type 2, you have a lot of options for reducing how much insulin you need-- I'm not there yet (thank heaven!), but it's nearly universal among my older family members, and I expect it. If I were staring down that kind of drug bill, I'd be looking into ALL of them: supplements, exercise programs, low-carb, keto, intermittent fasting, stress-reduction, sleep improvement, the whole shebang. Because they're all cheaper than insulin...

That executive order just boils my eyeballs. I mean, WHY??

My husband didn't have health insurance last year at this time, so he was able to get free insulin via the Lilly Cares program. Now that the year is up, we are staring down the barrel of $500 a month insulin. It's less expensive for him to quit his job so that he can stay home and take care of himself if that's the case. But what kind of "leader" does this? My husband is Type 2, but he has had diabetic symptoms since childhood, so his diabetes might actually be Type 1. For severe Type 1 diabetics, many of whom are children, Biden's reversal of Trump's price-lowering is a death sentence. And that's just for diabetics... Potato-for-Brains also raised the price of epi-pens, so anyone who is allergic to peanut butter had better be rich or they're dead too.

It was a gift to his drug-company campaign donors, I'm sure.

I think a lot of people in your situation would be seriously considering becoming officially unemployed, and joining the "gray" economy of cash-and-trade work. That's likely to be a growing segment of the population in the coming years.

I've got my foot in the door where that's concerned -- I have some students whose large family cannot afford lessons, but they're talented and hard-working, so I'm giving them lessons in trade for cleaning the Studio and other miscellaneous stuff, such as guest vocals for recording projects (sometimes you need kid's voices and this is the case right now). They actually helped me hoodoo floor wash the Studio last night! We had fun and the kids, who range in age from 4 - 16, got to learn a bit of practical magic.

Glad to hear it! My grade-school education was far less sucky than it could have been because of deals like that. We cleaned the classrooms and bathrooms at my parochial school for four years in lieu of tuition for me and my brother. I bypassed all but six weeks of public middle school that way, and I'm extremely grateful for all the people who were flexible enough to make that happen.

That's amazing! I realized long ago that I would rather have poor students who are motivated than rich students who are there for the prestige value of being involved in music. The problem, of course, was finances. Nowadays anyone sensible enough not to get a vaccine for an endemic disease that kills less than 1 percent is being forced into the shadow economy you mentioned earlier. In a twisted way, I'm grateful for the Plandemic because it proofed me against worst case scenarios. My business seems to have survived the worst case scenario for now. As of January I was resolved to close my commercial space and move one piano to my home and the other to my parent's house and teach out of both of those spaces. What the experience has taught me is to let go of needing to make that commercial rent every month. I'll teach music pretty much until the day I die as that is my karma from past lives of being an arrogant music entertainer who denigrated music teaching. Finances will never get in the way of me and my students because I won't let them. If I end up in a homeless camp, it simply means I'll start the best ever homeless person choir in existence LOL. Teaching music is a karmic sentence I serve out joyfully.

At least, you know what is your karma and have a good way to solve it. Having afflicted Mercury and Venus in my natal chart, I have yet to find out what the heck is wrong with my own karma and why.
The only thing that gives me some relief is feeling I'm working on solving it, even before knowing about placements on my natal chart. I have donated time and money for Wikipedia, and teached chess to teenagers, and I'm supporting education in several ways. Also, as a Customs Officer, I'm working to provide travelers with a safe experience. But I wish I knew what is my own mess, just like you look to know yours.
Edu

Most of my understanding of the tangled ball of intestines that is my natal chart came because of discursive meditation... I hope that helps!

Yes, it does. Thanks, Mrs Steele.

Insulin Prices Are Skyrocketing

Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful

Re: Wonderful