Mold. Mold. Mold.

As most of my family and friends know, I have a pesky blood clotting disorder (and the genetic markers for 4 additional ones). This means that I take blood thinners throughout all my pregnancy and six weeks after birth to ensure that I don't develop a blood clot and that the placenta/umbilical cord stay clot-free.

My insurance company is particularly adamant that I never fill my prescription for the blood thinners any more than 3 days before my current supply is due to run out. Thus, because of the time it takes my pharmacy to get the unusually high number of pre-filled syringes, I usually only have 1 day for a margin of error before running out of the drug.

Imagine my dismay when the very first syringe I pulled out looked like this:

Um, yeah. That's mold. In a syringe that I'm supposed to inject in myself. Thanks, but no thanks.

To their credit, my pharmacy was amazing and offered to exchange the drug right away. They called their wholesaler and found that all of the syringes they had were from the same batch. Then, the pharmacy called the drug manufacturer who said to use the rest of the syringes, and that if none of the other syringes showed signs of mold, that they were fine.

Um ... again, thanks but no thanks. Sure, they probably were just fine but why take the chance when I'm pregnant and especially vulnerable to infection?

I called around to all the pharmacies in the area to find out who had a different wholesaler and was lucky that Hoglund pharmacy had a different wholesaler for the drug. They checked their lot (at the wholesaler; they had none of the drug in stock at their pharmacy), found out it was a different lot, had the prescription transferred, and got me an emergency dose of 3 syringes for the weekend because of course, all of this drama happened on a Friday - too late to do anything about the replacement syringes for the weekend.

All in all, it will turn out absolutely fine - but it was 3 hours of phone calls, coordination and stress that neither Chris particularly had time for (he interfaced with the pharmacy as much as I did; he's pretty motivated to keep both me and Baby Girl Renoud safe). The entire experience makes me extremely grateful to have the best medical care, to have insurance and to even have the option of blood thinners. 

We remain extremely aware of our many blessings and extremely grateful every day for our healthy, happy family.