Living Without HepC

I recently received a “good news” email from Nadine Saubers. In 2005 Nadine was involved in creating and marketing two albums of Christmas Songs for dog and cat lovers – and developed the Pet Laughs web-site for them. She has just heard that two of the songs from Celebrate Catmas! and Celebrate Dogmas! have been chosen by Disney to be on the Disney compilation Christmas CD this year! As she says in her email “We’ve been working on getting an endorsement from someone with clout for a couple of years and for our purposes Disney is about as good as we can get!” And I have to agree – this is success to celebrate.

Nadine lives in California, and although we have never met, we have been in contact via internet for a few years now. Nadine had completed treatment for HepC in January 2005 but was left filling very ill and depleted after the treatment. She struggled with extreme fatigue, hypoglycaemia – just to name two things I recall her coping with. By Christmas 2006 she was beginning to feel better and had set up a website called Nadine Art, featuring a poster for Hepatitis C Awareness

By the summer of 2007 Nadine had just finished a book called “The Everything First Aid Book” when she was asked signed up to write and have published a book on fatigue – “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fighting Fatigue”.

Earlier this year she initiated a company called Use It Again Sam, reusable shopping bags she has designed and had made from nylon Ripstop (the same fabric used to make parachutes).

Along the way, Nadine also runs a life-coaching business and is a research assistant. She has provided services for an author and has worked on several documentaries for NHK, the Japanese Broadcasting Company. She also maintains the websites listed above and Nadine Saubers Virtual Assistant

While Nadine has chalked up an impressive list of achievements by anyone’s standards, I am just so struck how different, how positive this Nadine is compared to the one I first encountered. How much she has grown on her journey from illness to wellness. And I suspect she would say the experience of having had HepC has been a great influence in these changes.

I have encountered lots of people on my own journey with HepC, in the virtual and real world. A number of them moved away from the HepC world completely once they completed treatment and achieved PCR. And a lot remain in or hover on the edge of the HepC world still – and not just those who relapsed or were non-responders.

Many people find post- treatment symptoms like brain-fog and fatigue make the return to normality a slow and arduous journey. It is hard to stop thinking and behaving like a patient. I know. It was a struggle for me to overcome. I finally became determined to move back to what I called my “working life”, normality, not seeing myself as a patient or ex-patient. However, I see many people hanging on, seemingly unable to let go of this HepC illness.

So the point of writing about Nadine today is not just to say nice things about her. It is also to point out the possibilities and prospects of life after HepC. There are lots of places where we can hear chapter and verse of how awful it is to go through the experience of HepC and we can see how sour it has made some people. Time for other perspectives. We also need to hear about and celebrate the successes too, to flag up that there is also hope within this HepC world.

Carol, as ever the source of good ideas, has pointed out to me it would be useful and interesting to contact people who have now moved on from the HepC world and to ask them how HepC has changed their lives. So I will be writing more about other people’s experience of life after HepC and how it has impacted on them. And maybe experimenting with different media at the same time.

Like Carol and I on our recent visit to Spain, these cats seem more interested in soaking up the Spanish sunshine than anything else going on around them.

One of the things that changed when I was diagnosed with HepC - I slowed down and looked at the world differently. And that led to taking photographs from a different perspective than before, and more prolifically too. I really discovered a passion for images and capturing memories.

Now that I have decided to stop keeping this so blog firmly focused on my treatment for HepC, I think I will share more of my photos.

It is just over a year now that I finished working in Plymouth and moved away from an idyllic place to live.

This is the view from my living room window – what I saw every morning drinking my coffee, coming to and getting up to speed for the day.
And in the evening …….

This is one of the views from outside the building – a quiet walk along the promenade most evenings looking at this vista, winding down from the hectic activities of the day.

Working in Plymouth was my return to the working world. It was a challenge – stressful work days, helping to mend an organisation that was “broke” and needed fixing, getting up to speed remembering legislation and policy, learning a new computerised database, absorbing details of cases and remembering staff and colleague’s names. Fighting the brain fog that kept hanging around – and the fatigue which lingered on and on.

Living at Royal William Yard and savouring the weekends with Carol - at the beach, exploring Cornwall and Devon, shopping for and cooking the wonderful local fresh fish. All this provided a welcome respite and contrast. And has given me many happy memories.

Today I am missing living in Plymouth.