Whoa! My Lynparza cost right at $15,000 a month.

[DFW]

26. I wonder if you have what my wife had?

She had a rare form of uterine/ovarian cancer that usually only strikes women that are elderly or slender. Here in Germany, it is called “the murderer,” because it is so silent, it is usually only discovered at stage 3 or stage 4. It killed one of her best friends over in Holland. At the time she was diagnosed, she was uninsured (don’t believe the “everything is free there” crowd—it isn’t). She had quit her job at age 60, and German medicare doesn’t kick in until age 65.

But, Germany has a COBRA-like insurance you can buy for about $600 a month, so I jumped in and bought her that. She was diagnosed, pretty much by accident, at age 64, and told the “bad news (what you have is always fatal)/good news (we have never seen it diagnosed this early)” situation. She underwent a 5 and a half hour operation and they took 84 (!!!) biopsies. After three days of trembling, she got the news: ALL negative. The surgeon said it was the first time in 30 years he had ever told a patient this, but he thought she might be OK with no further treatment—her choice, chemo or not. Since she had undergone chemo the first time she had cancer at age 49, and suffered greatly under it, she decided to risk no further treatment.

Luckily, the insurance I had been paying for did not try to deny her treatment, so her operation and month in the hospital cost us nothing further than what I had been paying. I almost have a guilty conscience, with her having to go through two battles with cancer. I have serious heart issues, but I figure that with me, the Grim Reaper will just show up one day and say, “it’s time, so kiss your ass goodbye.” Although—both my parents and all their siblings had cancer, too, so I could be next in line for that, too. My insurance is American, which is to say, practically none, and the only German insurer that would give me a quote wanted €30,000 (about $34,000) a year to insure me in Germany. That was 12 years ago, so who knows what they’d want today?

I hope you manage to find a solution to your medication dilemma. Here, for my wife, at least she knew what to do, being a social worker, herself. But we are basically living under two uncaring governments. Many years ago, a member of the German government was caught saying he was against restricting smoking, because smoking caused a lot of people to die early, and thus be less of a financial burden on the government with their expensive cancer treatments. How’s THAT for government candor?