Comment by tonyarkles
4 months ago
Heh, the psychiatrist who diagnosed me laughed a little when I showed up rushed and late to my first appointment.
The good news is that after you’ve been diagnosed, getting near the bottom of the bottle of pills is a great reminder to call the pharmacy for a refill. Plus… shortly after noticing that you’re almost out happens to coincide with the medication taking effect, so you’ll be in the perfect place to make that call!
Assuming you're lucky in a couple of different ways, as regulations around stimulants in many countries really screws people with the executive functioning issues caused by ADHD.
Running out? Your physician needs to write a new prescription, since they can't write one with multiple refills. Maybe your physician will write multiple with "don't fill before" dates on them, but overzealous regulators make many uncomfortable writing more than your next 28-30 days of medication.
Called your physician and got them to send your new script in? Hope your pharmacist isn't an ass, because some will straight up refuse to fill until the exact day you run out. Oh, and hope they have it in stock - because limits regulators and/or distributors put on ordering make the lives of retail pharmacies just buying these medications a special kind of hell.
I've been extremely lucky, my physician wisely writes me 28 day scripts so I can consistently time my requests for a new prescription be written, so every fourth Monday I send him a message and no later than Wednesday I get a text saying it's been sent to my pharmacy. The pharmacy I get my medication filled at doesn't treat me like I'm scum that's going to be selling my medication, so I can easily pick up my next 28-day supply a few days before I would run out if it works better for my schedule. But more than once I've had to play the game of figuring out which store actually has my medication in stock, and have the script pulled and resent to a different location....
I'm not sure if it's country-wide, or province-wide, or if I just have a good combo of doctor + neighbourhood pharmacy but in Canada here I generally get 6 months of refills on a prescription. They're still somewhat strict on when you're allowed to get refills, it's usually within 7 days of running out. My doctor does require an in-person visit before doing the next 6-month prescription, mostly because they want to monitor whether or not it's having any blood pressure effects, but my pharmacy is really good about pointing out that the prescription I filled has 0 refills left and that I need to book an appointment for that.