12.28.2004

Health Update

I went for this month's blood test and to get my next prescription for Nolvadex-D. As I had experienced no side effects, I was given a 28 day prescription instead of 2 weeks worth. I'll be going on January 17th for a bone scan. The Japanese word was the Chinese letter for bone and phonetic characters SHIN and CHI, which apparently come from scinti, as in scintigraphy, which took me a while to figure out. I had the general idea that isotopes would be injected in the morning and images would be taken that afternoon but that "shinchy" word didn't have any equivalents in the on-line dictionaries. A quick search on Google for isotopes, bone and test brought me lots of pages with the necessary vocabulary to mire my way through the release which must be signed before the test.

The Nolvadex-D is about $1.35 per pill after the 70% National Health Care discount. Unfortunately, generic drugs have not reached Japan. I'm thinking of forgoing the NHI coverage of the drug and ordering at my own cost from a reliable online pharmacy in Australia for about 42 cents a pill including shipping as the generic version is so much cheaper. I will, of course, continue to make use of NHI for my monthly doctor visits.

0 comments: