We sat in the sun in the garden this mroning. Wonderful. We enjoyed our capuchino coffees (and Danish) listening to the birds and feeling the warmth of the sun. Later, a few emails, some work on the forum, lunch, a shower and a yoga class - that’s all I have managed to do today.
Other than the usual restrictions, nothing of interest to report on the symptoms and side-effects front.
Mynurse rang on Thursday to tell me the results of my blood work from Monday. Main headlines - thyroid tests indicate all is normal functioning there. ALT is 18 and AST is 23. So, good news.
By Friday evening I was wondering about the ALT. Since I was first tested my ALT’s have been bouncing around between 286 and 400. They were 313 when I started treatment 24 weeks ago. I have never had such a low ALT.
It goes with being in HepC treatment territory, I suppose, worrying about blood results. And maybe it’s hard to give up habitual behaviour. I actually began to wonder if my ALT could go too low (well my Neutrophils, WBC, etc all can and do). My head tells me this is not very sensible but I can still feel the little niggly doubt in my tummy that maybe this isn’t a good sign after all. Makes me wonder how easily I will be able to give up living on treatment side-effects at this rate.
Have managed to get the forum sorted out and organised - all ready to go live and it was launched earlier this afternoon. I am hoping it will be useful; early indications from the testing period are that people are using it.
I did have an unusual insight during my counselling therapy this week which I will share with you. It suddenly came to me - as insights often do, with a mixture of pain, tears and relief all at the same time.
Having been through the initial fears of starting the treatment and coped with the onset of the initial weeks of side-effects (and the Bell’s Palsy) I have now settled into this next stage of treatment where I can see some aspects of life as normal living again. Recently I even imagined I could undertake some types of work assignments that I am used to doing - until Carol pointed out I could be courting more stress by doing so. That was enough to stop me taking on the work - but I continued to think I could have done the work, if I had really wanted to.
What I suddenly faced was my own assumption - that if I just continue to cope with the medication and do the right things, avoid too much stress, eat the right food, do the right exercise, etc, that I will soon be able to have my life back to normal again. Where did that assumption come from? (Isn’t it what we learn from childhood?) Who knows, but it isn’t a reality. Living with ribavirin and interferon continuously coursing through my body cannot be normal life. While it saddens me to realise I can only now regard the rest of this treatment as ‘not normal’ life, it does make me relieved to think I now won’t be pressurising myself to achieve what I think is this ‘return to normal’ living.
I realised I have been pushing myself a lot to ‘normalise’ my life, not be an invalid, etc. With that recently came irritation and stress as I wasn’t really succeeding where I thought I could; then I was adding that old behaviour pattern - ‘giving myself a hard time’ (I should be doing ‘, I ought to try harder, etc).
Well, that was my insight. Often when people share personal insights, others can see that the ‘insight’ is all very obvious and self-evident. But I suppose that is what insight is - seeing something suddenly which is obvious but, until that moment, not evident to the individual. For me, this insight is one thing that can help me avoid depression on this treatment. If I had continued to operate under that false assumption it is likely I would eventually become more irritable, harder on myself and eventually spiralled into a real ‘down’ place, feeling sorry for myself and then depressed.
I suppose another life lesson which I can chalk up to the HepC experience. I am beginning to see what some people mean when they say hepatitis C has changed their life for the better.