It’s been about three years since my last post. I made this blog initially in the surge of overly bouncy energy that my first day on provigil gave me, thinking that cataloging the experience would be interesting, but after the first few days, those side effects went away and it became something I was only peripherally aware of by feeling more awake, like the difference between getting 4 hours of sleep and 8 hours of sleep.
My first round with provigil lasted a year or so. It’s not that the Doctor took me off it or anything, just that I switched insurance companies and had multiple headaches trying to refill my prescription and eventually gave up messing with it because it had mostly done the job and I was regularly waking up at reasonable times.
That lasted… a while. A few months. Maybe a year. Then I started drifting again. The doctor had me try out Ambien with the provigil — Ambien did nothing for me. I was terribly disappointed. I even tried it at double the dose and I was still up most of the night. It did make me extra groggy the next day though. He gave me some samples of Lunesta and those worked, but we’d just switched insurance companies again and more headaches with the mail-order prescriptions ensued, so I gave up on messing with it. I had saved a few pills and the doctor gave me some samples when I was in for the flu (“You’re my only patient that uses this stuff, and it’s expiring soon, so you might as well take it”), so I started just taking them when I knew I was going to be dead to the world without it. But those ran out months ago.
Now my sleep schedule is royally messed up again, my friend who was regularly dragging me out of bed to go to breakfast (and coincidentally make it in to work on time) has moved back to Kansas City, and work is getting a bit impatient with my irregular hours, so I got off my arse, got all my ducks in a row with the mail order pharmacy bits of my insurance plan, and asked the doc for a renewed prescription. I received the provigil Friday. I’m still waiting on the Lunesta (I think I messed it up when I hung up on the automated phone call when I realized it wanted my credit card number and I’d left my wallet sitting on my desk).
I took the first pill of my new prescription today. And… it’s much like the first time I took it, probably because i haven’t had one in months. Bouncing knee, too much energy, but not quite as irritatingly chipper. The fact that I actually slept quite a lot last night probably adds to it.
Oh — and current price through my insurance: $150 for a 90 day supply. They claim the price without the insurance is something like $1600. I think Cephalon hiked the price so they could encourage people to migrate to their new “Nuvigil” pill, which is basically identical to provigil but won’t be available as a generic for a very long time.