And I'll ... if I wanna.

[gement]

Last night I had my first full-on headache in months. This is because I'm out of Maxalt, preventative drug of the gods. More Maxalt costs $65 for 9 tabs, after insurance [Edit: I believe that means that it's $260 at full price, or $29/dose]. Bad, stupid insurance. Bad, stupid pharmaceutical companies. Anyone with advice on older migraine-shortcircuiter drugs that might be cheaper? Anyone know how drugs from Canada work?

[Edit: preventative is inaccurate. I am looking for, as xmurf describes below, a "stop migraine-in-progress widgit."]

So I'm still fragile and achy from that, and perennially stressed from grad school, but otherwise feeling well. And I found a hysterical quote from a sexual advice page on the subject of "what nice girls don't do..."

It’s just that whenever I hear a phrase like “that’s something women only do to please men,” my Dworkinite Early Warning System goes off like a fire alarm. I start ranting like a harpy and screaming things like, “You can’t tell me what to do! You can’t tell me what I like and don’t like to do in bed! You don’t know anything about anything! You’re a narrow-minded, repressed moron, you’re probably frigid, and your mother dresses you funny!” and other equally relevant and coherent pearls of wisdom. I’ll try not to do that here. I’ll be good now, I promise. I’ll be calm and rational and sensitive and just talk to you about buttfucking. -- Greta Christina

Comments

[corivax.livejournal.com]

I was taking ergotamine for a while, but at the time it was even more expensive, around $20 a dose (though you're paying for the injector and all that, too, so it might be cheaper if they've figured out another way to take it by now.) Also, ergotamine, as you might guess from the name, is a controlled substance, being only one very small chemical step away from LSD. :) While I'm not sure, I think that may've raised the price as well, since they have to do all this extra paperwork and identity checks with it.

Wish I had a more useful suggestion. :)

[xmurf.livejournal.com]

I think I still have one of Corvi's ergotamine inhalers at home if you want it but I have no idea if it's expired or not (probably is). And it's not a preventative, it's a stop-migraine-in-progress widget.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I was reading today about a transcranial magnetic stimulation system -- basically a handheld MRI for your brain -- that has been experimentally used in stopping migraines. It was about as effective as some of the serotonin-based drugs, but the difference was that in some significant fraction of people (30-40%) it resulted in permanent cessation of migraines. I'll try and find more info.

[maribou]

Imitrex worked really well for me... it doesn't work for a lot of people, but when it does work, it *works* - such that even though it's expensive, I only ever needed a third of a pill to stop the migraine dead in its tracks in 30 minutes or less. So 10 bucks a pill is not so bad if it's really 3.33 a migraine. But still pretty expensive.

[maribou]

PS That's a great quote.

[hotpoint.livejournal.com]

I get the impression that drugs in Canada cost about as much as insurance copays here. I did a quick check on Maxalt and what appear to be its chemical relatives (Imitrex, Zomig and Amerge) all appear to be $10/pill and up from the main Canadian pharmacies.

Those pharmacies work by having your faxed-in prescription verified by a Canadian doctor, a new prescription written, and the drugs mailed to you. I have no idea whether there are issues with them getting confiscated at the border, but there are Dark Rumors about the Canadian government making sure that its citizens don't have their prescription drugs siphoned away by Americans.

Stopping a migrane is a huge quality-of-life issue. I hope you can find either a reasonable supply of that drug or something else that works well.

And that's an absolutely terrific quote! I'll go look up the column now...

[dianthus.livejournal.com]

Can we grow our own on rye?

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

Drugs from Canada work pretty well.

(That's probably not what you meant, though..)

[gement.livejournal.com]

First two results for Dworkinite Early Warning System pop it up, no problem. :)

I am going to ask a doc if there are cheaper options worth testing, and if not I'll probably suck it up and pay the Man. I still need to know about the Canada thing, though, because my other drug is Lamictal and I cannot mess around with that one.

It's keeping me out of the pits and precipices of stress-triggered bipolar,

it's the only one I've tried that's been effective without excessive emotional damping or side effects, and

if I skip it for a week I have to start ramping up from scratch.

[gement.livejournal.com]

You always come up with the most wonderful mad-sci options... Please do, and let me know.

On the subject of funny metal hats, you said once that you might be amenable to helping me with an Eowyn helmet? The styling of her official helmet is quite over the top. I much prefer Merry's. In terms of something reasonably producable and butch-looking, I was thinking a round helmet with metal banding and a nose stripe, with the ability to tie on a leather ear/neck guard around the sides.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Reference? It *sounds* totally wacky and new-age-crystal-woo-woo, but with the lack-of-success my sister has had with treatment so for, it's worth looking for alternatives.

-B.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I think that would not be difficult. I've made similar things out of pure copper. I can now weld copper or bronze sheet together, if necessary, and recently just found sources for both copper and bronze sheet.

This isn't actually that difficult to do. If you check out and read, for instance, Oppi Untracht's "Jewelry Concepts And Technology" you'll be well on your way. Lemme do a very quick summary: take three 3/4" pieces of plywood and one 3/8" piece on top, about 1 foot square. Make a paper template of your head, the way a hat would fit around it. (Doesn't have to be perfect: an ellipse with the right front-to-back and left-to-right works.) Trace that on the top piece of plywood. Put a 1 foot square piece of copper between the three thick plywood and the one thin one, drill eight holes around the circumference of the stack. Remove teh copper, bolt the others back together, and cut out the ellipse through all four pieces of plywood. Put the copper back in and bolt it back together. Now you sink the copper into the hole. The easiest way is to take a piece of 5/8" dowel or such, and sand the end kind of roundish/hemispherical, put a handle on it (a piece of 1/4" dowel sticking into the side of it) and then start hammering in circles, driving the copper sheet down into the hole. Well, spirals, really -- all the way around the outside, then a second run just inside the first, and so forth until you get to the center. Unbolt the stack and heat the copper with a plumber's torch until it just barely glows red in the dark, dunk it rapidly in cold water, then bolt it back up and keep hammering. Eventually you have a copper hat with a square brim, that fits your head down to your eyes. Cut off the brim, cut a strip of bronze to go around your brow and rivet it to the copper (drill holes every, oh, say, 3/8", using a 3/32" drill, then get some standard 14 gauge Romex electrical wire, strip the copper out (or buy it bare), clip off pieces about 3x the thickness of the two layers of metal, push them through the holes, and gently hammer on each side. (Faster way: get piece of random steel chunk -- a bit of a railroad track works well if you can find one. Drill hole 3/32" diameter, about 3/16" deep. Stick the copper wire through the two pieces of metal and down into the hole, clip off the wire a little above the surface of the metal and hammer it down, pull it off the anvil, turn it over, and hammer the other side. Two perfect rivet heads.)) Then similarly rivet on the descender material -- the nasal and the cheek reinforces.

Copper armor is seriously not all that difficult to do and is immensely rewarding, and you don't have to buy any strange tooling. A large hammer, a pair of wire clippers, a hacksaw and some files, and a drill, and you're in business.

If you want, I could supply the plywood with the correct hole in it, and the bolts. I have *several* sets of these laying around and all that's really important is that the top and first layer have the right size; the lower ones just are there to support the hammering.

For finishing, it looks great if you go over it with 220 grit sandpaper and leave it at that. Oh, and spray coating to prevent it going all brown.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Note that the detailing on the nasal and the browpiece are very much more difficult, but making a copper/bronze helmet is easily doable at home. It'd probably take a good 20 hours of work, though.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

wendevious has experimented with TMS. I found the article in a print copy of New Scientist. Lemme do some exploration. I can't find anything online but I'll try and hunt it down at work (where the magazine resides.) They were talking about a commercial, handheld version to be released soonish, and this was from a 2004 article.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm wrong: a quick search of New Scientist didn't yield anything. It might've been any of six other magazines. Lemme dig it up on Monday.

[xmurf.livejournal.com]

Are you on grad-student health insurance now?

[gement.livejournal.com]

Yup. It's a 20% copay for 2nd Tier (brand name, standard drugs). 10% and 30% for generic and special tiers, respectively.