hypochondria: it's what's for breakfast

My hip hurts, and there is no visible bruise.  And the spot I fell on is right by the joint, the place where if you move your leg forward and you happen not to carry your extra weight in that spot you can sort of feel where the muscle and the bone shift?  And a clubmate of ours was telling me how when he was a teenager, he did something traumatic and wound up with a nasty staph infection in his hip, in the bursa sac, and almost lost his leg, and spent three months in traction and was then on crutches for a year and a half.

Note to self:  you are not even one-sixth the athlete B is, so you probably couldn't achieve the kind of jarring whatever-it-was he did to his leg when he was a kid if you tried; plus you didn't actually drive the femur up into the socket, but instead whacked it from the side.  There is a particularly unpleasant staph bug going around externally, though, so that burn on your hand?, keep it covered.

FEH.

So the mood swings are in full -- ha, you thought I was going to say full swing, didn't you? No. In full effect. They shouldn't be called mood swings in my case, I guess, because what happens is that the mood swings itself over to "rotten" and then stays there for about 48 hours. This is pretty reliable, and has been happening at the beginning of the fourth row of pills for, shockingly, as long as I've been on this particular (generic) brand. So I did successfully lobby my doctor to switch me back to a (brand) brand I've had before and which I know doesn't cause this particular side effect. It wasn't hard to convince her, which pleased me.

Now the insurance company has charged me far more than the co-pay for a brand-name drug, because the drug is available in generic and I insisted on the brand. In this circumstance, they charge the generic co-pay plus the difference between this and the full price of the brand-name drug. Argh. I have written to the benefits review committee and the doctor will be writing to them as well, arguing (as is my right) that the brand-name drug is necessary and the generic unacceptable.

But I have no way to predict whether they will decide in my favor. A panel on which nobody has ever met me will be deciding whether my side effects are debilitating or not. Who are they to decide whether I should be able to live with these side effects? I say they are, and my doctor agrees; I can't spend two days out of every fourth week in this kind of depressed state. It is a quality of life issue. I am taking half a sick day this afternoon, is how shitty I feel. And yet I'm prepared to bet the committee decides I'm just whining and the generic medicine is plenty effective and if I want the stuff that doesn't WRECK ME I can jolly well shell out for it.

I hate this. (And I'm not wild about the fact that I feel guilty about using sick time, as well. I'm just saying.)