Living Without HepC

More good news from Mynurse. I telephoned to check on my blood test results from last week. My blood sugar levels and platelet count remain down, but not concerning. However my ALT is now 59! This is the closest to normal range my ALT’s have been for years. That means my liver is less inflamed and clearly is benefiting from all those pharmaceuticals bombarding my immune-system and the nasty virus!

Having admitted she has read this weblog, Mynurse has pronounced it as funny - reading my description of the first injection gave her a good laugh. And she confirms she wishes to remain “in the closet” and only be known as Mynurse. Hmm.

Today is the first day I am doing my injection at home. I have even watched the video supplied by Roche at their Pegasys website! What can go wrong?

I followed all the instructions, washing my hands, checking the meds and dates, put the needle onto the syringe, etc, etc. Then I noticed a big air bubble at the bottom of the syringe. Tap, tap on the syringe - this didn’t shift it. More tapping. Invert the syringe so the air in the barrel bursts the bubble. Nope. The bubble remained firmly there. If the bubble had been near the top of the syringe it would have passed out through the needle when the ‘plunger’ was pushed - but this bubble was at the bottom, on the plunger itself. I knew I can’t inject myself with this bubble still in the syringe.

Despite it being 7:30 pm I decided I would page Mynurse - as she had given me her pager number for just such events. While I waited for her to call back, my son Phil asked what was up and could he take a look at it. What do you know about air bubbles in syringes, I asked. Oh it’s easy dad, you see everything on Casualty these days.

I had put the interferon syringe back in the fridge after I had paged Mynurse. When I got it out to show Phil the problem I realised that the bubble had, in the meantime, dispersed. An even more embarrassed call to the Paging service to apologise and cancel the previous call.

After this hitch was sorted out the rest was easy and done in about two minutes. Sharps disposed of safely in the yellow sharps box.

And another week without the flu, I hope! I can’t take for granted that I won’t have these side-effects but as each week goes by I am hopeful that they won’t start now. I can cope with the flu-like side-effects if I have to - but I would obviously prefer to have no more than the side-effects I am already experiencing.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2004 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.