Anxious

Stolen entire from Doctor Grumpy in the House:

Dr. Grumpy: "This is Dr. Grumpy, returning a page."

Mr. Lacune: "Hi, thish ish Dave Lacune, you shaw me at the hoshpital a few days ago, when I had a shtroke."

Dr. Grumpy: "Yes sir, are you okay? Your speech is pretty slurred, and I don't remember it having been affected by the stroke."

Mr. Lacune: "I'm fine. Look, you preshcribed Nomocva to me, to keep me from having another a shtroke, but I read about all itsh shide effectsh, and sho now I shtopped it and I'm afraid to take it."

Dr. Grumpy: "I'm kind of concerned you've had another stroke, sir. Your speech is pretty slurred."

Mr. Lacune: "Nah, my shpeech ish like thish because I've been doing tequila shotsh and shmoking weed all night because I'm anxioush."

Pause

Dr. Grumpy: "What are you so anxious about?"

Mr. Lacune: "Becaushe I shtopped Nomocva, sho now I'm worried I might have another shtroke."

I'm taking Eliquis because some people I know are worried that I might have a stroke. The doc prescribed it because I have an irregular heartbeat, which means my heart might not be doing a good job of emptying the chambers every time it beats, which might lead to blood pooling and then coagulating into clots and then the clots might get pumped out into the circulatory system and when they get down to the small blood vessels, they would jam, and if that jam happened in the brain, that would be a stroke.

Eliquis is ridiculously expensive. Retail it runs about $600 a month. I have some kind of health insurance, so I'm not paying full tilt, but it's still enough to notice. It costs that much because the patent hasn't expired.

When I got out of the hospital (ten or twenty years ago), previous doc put me on Coumadin (also known as rat poison). It's cheap but it's kind of persnickety. They want a blood test every week or two. I did that for a while, but the results always came back the same, and since the blood tests were annoying, I quit going as often as I should. Eventually my doctor noticed and took me off of it because I "was a bad patient". Eventually he retired, and I started seeing his replacement who wanted me to start taking this fancy new drug that didn't require a blood test. The price annoyed me, but my daughter the nurse made a fuss, so now I take it.

Never heard of Nomocva and neither has Google. I imagine the two people talking knew what they were talking about.