Has Hepatitis C positively or negative... - Hepatitis C Support
Has Hepatitis C positively or negatively impacted your personal relationships? Share your experiences in the comments.
Many years ago when I found out I was hcv positive in the 90's I had to tell my then boyfriend, who I was in love with. He thought I had known all along and moved to another town! It was devastating and took me a while to recover. Since then though I have been in a twelve year relationship with a lovely guy who took it all in his stride. Any friends that I have told have been fine with it. I have to say though I have not told all my friends, because of what they might think about the way I caught it.
Hep C is pretty much a slow, silent killer, and actually, (@) Bee-eater it was admitted to me by a top consultant that over 40% of diagnosed cases do not conform to the stereotype "druggy" sharing needles and they have absolutely no idea of how when or where Hep C was contracted.
It is only relatively recently that all clients of STD clinics are routinely tested for Hep C. The implication is that many, many, perfectly "respectable" "pillars of society" are all unknowingly going about their daily business with Hep C quietly gnawing away at their liver.
The fact is that the majority diagnosed, junkies and the like, were diagnosed because they got sicker quicker than "ordinary" people.....and were caught in the net. Thus it is the common misconception that the route for infection was via "drugs, sex, and rock'n'roll" which is not at all the case.
It appears the other, "straights" of society were only diagnosed when far too late and written up as cirrhosis, liver failure and/or HCC.
My Hep C was diagnosed when at the start of my present long-term relationship when we both had a precautionary check-up. (Females especially can have a number of STD's without knowing and even the purest of wives can be quietly infected by an erring partner.) So, I had it. she did not. Surprise!
Now ten years later, she still hasn't contracted my infection, in spite of the fact I only started the antivirals course a short time ago....I would not even have got that if I had not had a supportive consultant who pushed for me for the funding allocation, because in spite of having had the cancer, my liver was not up to the cirrhosis parameter required.
The new treatments are VERY expensive.
By the way, people, please do not take offense at anything I have said; I am myself a "survivor" in the technical sense; I have self-medicated hypodermically in the distant past, yet NEVER shared a needle with any other body.
I also have no idea when or where I contracted Hep C, the possibility is in the early 70's selling blood to a dubious clinic in Athens, otherwise several transfusions at various times of rehydration for dysentery in India in the late 70's and the 80's.
Having said that, when I was diagnosed in '05 the viral load was very low and I refused the then 12months of Interferon offered on grounds that I was already feeling bad enough with M.E. and could not tolerate the side-effects. Fast forward to 2015 and the viral load is through the ceiling; I had borderline fibrosis/cirrhosis and a 3.5 cm HCC.
MY experience tells me that the professional guys who know the most are also the most confused and uncertain; its an exploration into a vast terra incognita for all concerned and no map yet detailed enough to cover every corner of it.
They may talk as if they know what they are doing, but truly, in the long run each one of us is an experiment......One thing I am sure about is that the patient must take control, ask questions and ascertain facts before consenting to any invasive procedure or potentially hazardous course of treatment.
Apart from eventually leading to liver cancer, which is hoped now to be ex-cancer, not much at all. However, I am socially crippled by M.E. and Hep C certainly has not been helping that.
Now in the last 7 days of a twelve weeks course of antivirals I can say for sure that there is some little corner of well-being in me which wasn't there before and for sure I have for the first time in years a genuine appetite and feeling of hunger, formerly I ate well and regularly, but only as a duty for survival and with no interest or enjoyment.
I look forward to the end of the course and full recovery from the anti-viral side effects, although I am clear that the major, disabling symptoms of M.E. are not going away in a hurry.
I do expect that my "good" times will be somewhat more good, and the bad times somewhat less bad.