For years, Artemis Bayandor found it impossible to lose the 25 pounds she gained after her pregnancy. But when her doctor suggested she start taking the weight loss drug Wegovy in August, 2021, she lost 15 pounds in six months.

“I felt good. It was easy, it came off and it was making me feel better,” she tells The Messenger.

Bayandor, 41, a mom of one who works in customer service for United Airlines, had her heart set on getting below her pre-pregnancy weight and easily went from 230 pounds to 215.

“I just didn’t have an appetite,” she says. “If I normally ate two slices of pizza, I was only able to eat one.” 

But quickly becoming full with those smaller portions came to an abrupt halt when she discovered that the manufacturer’s coupon she used to get Wegovy for $25 a month had stopped.

Marcella Raymond, 58, felt awful soon after she started Mounjaro in August of 2022. She lost 8 pounds in two weeks but continuous nausea and dry heaving forced her to stop her weekly injections.

“It was making me very sick,” Raymond, a former on-air television reporter from a Chicago suburb, tells The Messenger.

She quickly regained all the weight plus 6 more pounds, hitting 195 pounds. A year after her first go-round with a weight loss drug, in August, 2023 she told her doctor she would give Ozempic a try. 

Within a month she lost 5 pounds, but stopped on Sept. 1 because of nausea and stomach distress. Raymond then turned to Noom, a weight loss app, and has since shed 13 pounds by tracking her weight and food.

“It’s taken longer to lose but I’ve lost more and feel great,” she says. “I’m hungry at times but never sick. And it actually works.”

Meanwhile, since Bayandor has been off of Wegovy, it’s been impossible for her to shed even a pound.

She’s made numerous appeals to her insurance company to cover a weight loss drug, and is considering the more extreme bariatric surgery – which insurance will pay for. 

“My weight is impacting my whole lifestyle and my health,” she says, “it’s been a major struggle.

”If I were to be able to at least get on a drug that could kick start things and get me 20, 30, 40 pounds lighter, and then I can keep it up with diet and exercise,” Bayandor says. “I’d love to do that, but I don’t have that opportunity.