Home Sweet Home

I did some serious scurrying this morning!  Took Emmi out for a short business walk and got to work.  I wanted to clean the rig and bathe Emmi--Michael had decreed that we be moving by 10am and we were, out of the fairgrounds and through downtown Tucson to Costco.  Tucson had some serious traffic issues for several years while redoing the downtown portion of the I10 freeway closing ALL freeway exits and entrances into downtown for years!!  Well, we cursed the city fathers for all those years but now, it was all worth it—we sailed through downtown Tucson.

Took us 2 hours in Costco partly because of a prescription snafu!  And partly because we were stocking up for our coming Costco-less months!  On the way out we had to have Costco yogurt, too!

OK, tell me again there isn’t something wrong with our medical system.  There is a drug out there called colchicine—taken by thousands of people for gout.  Even though supposedly Michael doesn’t have gout, his rheumatologist has him taking a very low dose of this medication daily.    This medication has been around for years and years and years—it is cheap with a 30 day supply costing less than a $1/day.  Fast forward to today—the pharmacist informs me, “they aren’t making colchicine anymore.”  And oh, by the way because they aren’t making it anymore, it is now going to cost twice as much. 

On the way out of Tucson I called Arch our retired doctor friend in Montana who also happens to be taking colchicine.  Here is his story—another drug company decided no one had every really done any studies on why colchicine works or its side effects in spite of the fact the FDA had approved this drug so long ago no one remembers when.  This company does a study and presents its findings to the FDA who says, OK, great—your company can now have the sole rights to make this drug.  Now isn’t that just great and guess who gets to pay!!!!!  The pharmacist in Costco says he expects the price of this drug to skyrocket.  I checked the price at CanadaDrugs.com today and it is one half the OLD price of Colchicine.  Gotta love our American medical system!

We arrived in Bouse about 4pm, did our usual scouting around for sites and finally settled on one near where we parked last year.  JB and Brenda are parked just up the wash from us and invited us for dinner.  Brenda fed us an incredible meal—huge hamburgers with onions and mushrooms and baked beans with chocolate cake and ice cream for dessert!  I thought we were going to stop eating when we got to the dessert????  We had a great evening visiting with what now feels like old friends.

Emmi is loving being not on a leash and we are all looking forward to a long walk in the morning!

We were very disappointed to learn that Gina and Rollie are not on their way here but are instead delayed until next week but we understand and send our prayers and thoughts their way!