Ok I wrote this entry 2 days ago when it was my third anniversary and I didn’t get to post it. Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment to find out the results of my recent liver biopsy and WOW, it’s good, no problems. We went out and celebrated with lunch and pigged out. From this point on is what I had already written and I don’t feel like picking it apart, so here goes.

Today is the third anniversary of my liver transplant. I have had this blog for way over 2 years and been encouraged by my husband and others to write and while I can write, I can talk better. So this may seem a little disjointed.  I, myself, think it’s very important to have people hear that these bad things like Hepatitis C can happen to regular people, not just people doing drugs and such. This disease is in epidemic proportions right now. What can you do about it? I’ll get back on this part in a later post.

I pictured myself as a pretty boring person in that I never smoked, only drank when I went out and was teased because I was a light weight. Never did drugs, have no piercings, and of course no tattoos. Pretty boring, right? The one thing I did have was blood transfusions when I was young. I hemorrhaged after one of my babies was born and as they say the rest is history. I was lucky in that my Hepatitis C was slow growing, but all of my adult life I felt like I had a touch of the flu and always was so tired. Of course, I had 4 babies in a little over 5 years and I worked most of the time, who wouldn’t be tired. Since they didn’t even know about Hep C until the early 1990’s and had no filter system for blood donated until the mid 90’s, I guess you can see how there might be an epidemic out there now.

Advance about 35+ years and I find out that I have Hep C. What a shock! I had never even heard of it to start with and now I find I have this disease. I had been going to the doctor most of my life for female problems, had blood tests, was treated for arthritis, etc and this never showed up. I found out that this disease had been systematically destroying my liver without me even knowing it. I have always been one of these people to follow the doctor’s orders, do what I was told to do and never question anything even if I didn’t feel good. Now I question everything.

Some of the history here is sketchy as I didn’t keep a journal and I wish I had but didn’t know what was to come.

Of course when the Hep C was discovered, I was put into a treatment – interferon and ribavarin – and of course that’s really a treat. It lasted 10 months, feeling nauseous, fatigue, general bad feeling and hoping that this will take care of this disease. No such luck. I found out that I have Genotype 1, the hardest to cure. Six months to a year go by and now I have another treatment to start – this one with ribavarin and infergen – same lousy feeling, but with an added treat of taking a shot everyday instead of once a week for the 10 months.  About 6 to 8 months after finishing that treatment, I was starting to feel like eating more like normal and I started having a persistent back ache. Actually I had had this back ache before but every time I complained about it, I was told that there was nothing there and put it off to fatigue. On one of my regular doctor visits, my back was aching more and my husband mentioned it to the doctor. I was lucky, in that they ordered blood tests and added an AFP test, tumor marker, to the regular ones. At the same time I was given an order for an ultra sound to be done as soon as possible. Within a couple of days of having these tests done, I was called into the office. They saw a shadow on my liver on the scan and my blood test came back with the tumor marker high. Within days again, I had an MRI and was told that I had liver cancer. Now I really had a shock. At some point before this I had been put on the transplant list with end stage liver disease and now with the cancer diagnosis, I was pushed up higher on the list. At this point I was given (no wrong word) prescribed a drug for liver cancer. I started this and of course, as with many drugs, had minor complications such as itching, nausea, hair loss, etc but it seemed to be helping. I also had two treatments of Chemo embolism to kill the tumor. That’s a fun treatment too. But it did the job until the transplant and I was very lucky because of early detection of my cancer.

Check in the next few days for more of my story and please if you would like to post comments or your story, please feel free. Be happy, be healthful,

Pat

Related articles

• Beverly Hills Gastroenterologist, Ari Nowain, MD, Discusses the New CDC Guidelines for Hep C Testing
• Dr Matthew Foxton, hepatologist, joins HepatitisCNews.com
• HCV Coalition for the Cure launches White House Petition to end Hepatitis-C

I’ll be posting about my journey soon – stay tuned.