Waiting for treatment

[JoanneG45]

When am I getting the treatment for hep c? When I'm dead!

[Bolly]

What genotype are you Joanne and what level of liver damage do you have. How did you become infected and how long have you had the virus?

[JoanneG45 in reply to Bolly]

I am Geno 1a, have mild fibrosis, don't know how I became infected, probably has it for 25 years as I can remember a time when I went completely yellow but that was about 1993 and was not tested for hep c.

Jo.

[Bolly in reply to JoanneG45]

Are you in the UK waiting for NHS funded treatment, or in the US where your insurance would pay?

[JoanneG45]

I'm in the UK and haven't got a spare £35,000 to spend on treatment. Hopefully will be put on treatment in January !!!

What about you? What is your situation?

[Bolly]

It is very expensive isn't it! That's why not every NHS trust has the funds to pay for everyone with HCV to be treated and why there is rationing of the treatment to those who will benefit most from it? I'm on a drug that costs £7 a day that I take for the rest of my life. I have HBV which can't be cured like your HCV can, just suppressed. I hope you get the treatment in January. Maybe work on giving your liver as much TLC as you can until then. Some people go on an anti inflammatory nutrition plan.

[JoanneG45]

Yes I am doing loads for my liver and have actually got my viral load down from 660,000 to 82,000! so I shouldn't moan. Do you get symptoms from hep B? What are they? Must be hard knowing that you cannot get rid of the virus. What is the long term outlook? Sorry to pry!

[Bolly]

Glad to hear your viral load is down. Keep doing whatever you are doing! The only HBV symptom I get is fatigue. It's never been bad enough to give me jaundice or gastric problems. Silently it worked away damaging my liver (same as HCV does) but I had no monitoring so didn't know how bad it was til I was diagnosed 5 years ago with liver cancer. I'd been HBV positive for 30yrs by then.

As long as I take my meds every day the virus should no longer cause scarring. But as my liver cells have already started to mutate into cancer cells there is a high risk I will get another tumour at some point. So we monitor carefully for the rest of my life!