Living Without HepC

My first appointment of the day was with Mynurse at her clinic. I had arrived a few minutes early and was there when Mynurse brought out another patient at the end of their appointment. It was Wendy Meister. If you have been reading both her and my blogs you may have realised that Wendy and I have twigged that we have the same nurse - and I recognised that Wendy’s first treatment injection coincided with my regular appointment, and that we might meet up at the clinic.

It was really good to meet Wendy in person - but what a moment for her to have to meet someone new! Five minutes after she had had her first self-injection of interferon. I remember my own experience of the first injection - I couldn’t really have had a conversation with anyone at that point - I was too pre-occupied with having just injected the strong and dreaded pharmaceuticals into my body and aware of every sensation happening to me like it could be a symptom. I tried to bear this in mind as we spoke about blogging, hepC and so forth. But Wendy was coping with it all admirably and remarkably calm with it. I found myself tuning in to Wendy’s excitement about the start of the treatment process and to the hope that this is the start of a successful journey through treatment - what we all aim for! We chatted throughout the time Mynurse saw her next patient and said good-bye when Mynurse came to collect me.

After the intensive weekly appointments at the beginning of treatment I was aware of there being a longer gap since we last met. So amidst my usual bantering and teasing comments, Mynurse managed to extract from me the details of any current symptoms and to discuss my current progress. Somehow (do we really not know how? brainfog!) I managed to forget to ask about using alcohol swabs beforehand on the injection site - a topic I referred to finding out about recently.

As it was the first time we had met since my Week 12 blood tests we discussed those - and I discovered the news about my results is better than I had realised at the time.

The NICE guidelines refer to showing a “log 2″ drop in viral load in order to continue treatment. What my results showed was even better - no viral load to measure. I hadn’t really taken this on board at the time. So, based on this, there is a 90% chance I will achieve a positive outcome at the end of treatment. In discussing this, I think both Mynurse and myself were careful to recognise that the next period of time could bring changes and there are no guarantees on the outcome. But, this is encouraging news and I can’t resist celebrating it as a positive.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 10:09 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.