Fun with Enbrel

After a few weeks of wrangling with my health insurance company (who doesn't like to pay for Enbrel because the shit costs about $1500.00 per month), I finally managed to get my prescription filled and took my first dose yesterday evening. When I was on Enbrel a couple of years ago, it was a twice-weekly dose and kind of a pain to take -- you had a vial full of the actual drug in powder form, and a syringe full of saline, which you had to inject into the vial, then wait about ten minutes for it to mix, then draw it all back into the syringe, and then inject it. They've streamlined the process since then -- it's now a once-weekly dose and it comes pre-mixed in a pre-filled syringe, so you just have to grab a syringe out of the fridge, wait for it to get to room temperature, and inject.

However, there are a couple of new issues with the pre-filled syringes, which the pharmacy nurse warned me about beforehand. First, for some reason, the needle is rather dull, so you really have to jab it pretty hard to get it to pierce your skin, which is a bit uncomfortable. Second, the Enbrel burns like fire as you inject it. When the nurse warned me about this, I figured it wouldn't be a big deal, but damn. After I finally got the frigging needle into my skin and started to inject the meds, it burned so much that I uttered a stream of profanity til it was over -- "Motherfucker! Holy shit! OUCH!" For a few hours afterwards, the skin around the injection site, a couple inches in diameter, was hot, red, and itchy, which is also a normal side effect.

Okay, maybe I'm just a wimp, but I'm dreading having to do that once a week. Thank goodness it's no longer a twice-weekly dose.