Living Without HepC

It’s the day after my 16th injection. I think I am beginning to see a pattern … another day when I am walking around in a “dream-like” state; nothing is getting done quickly nor do I feel any initiative; the telephone message asking if I will do some (high stress) work will have to wait - I started this entry almost three hours ago but had to go off for a shower, have lunch, etc, so I want to concentrate on finishing it. (I will have to tell them later I don’t want any high stress work at the moment.)

I suspect the pattern is a ‘day like this’ follows the day after my injection. Although other weeks I have felt a ‘day like this’ on the day or two before the next injection - so I cannot say with certainty there is a pattern!!

Someone recently asked me in an email: Do you feel worse on injection day? Is it worth arranging that for last thing Friday in the hopes of being fine by Monday?

Both these issues were ones I thought about before treatment started. I think the biggest problem I found and I think others’ experience bears this out - it isn’t really possible to predict how you and the interferon and ribavirin are going to interact!! I only began to find out from experience, after I started. And now, in Week 15 you can see I am still trying to spot the patterns.

Yesterday was my injection day. It has now become so routine that I found myself thinking “there are five minutes or so before dinner, time enough to do my injection”. And I did do the injection and then sat down for my meal - very different than my attitude or behaviour in the first few weeks. I felt no particular effects, although I believe I was sleepier earlier than usual last night.

I had also heard the advice “injection on Friday, and back to normal by Monday”. When I went to Mynurse’s clinic I realised we would be starting a routine of injecting on Mondays - as that was her clinic day to see me. I saw her weekly for a month and then began monthly visits - all on Mondays. We discussed changing the injection day, over time, to a Friday because of the advice I was given.

Mynurse talked with me how to plan ahead and make the switch to another day, if I wanted to do so after that initial period. However, my experience after a few weeks was than the day after the injection was not specifically difficult, and some weeks I experienced a ‘bad’ day on other weekdays, not just the day after. So I couldn’t then see any advantage to changing the injection day from Monday.

I would suggest a good exploration of the Hepatitis C Trust website, under the section called Treatment. There are a number of pages of information on preparing for treatment and managing yourself on treatment, which are useful to consider.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005 at 2:35 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.