I am a 57-year-old white American male infected with Hepatitis C. I am involved in a controlled medical research study by Roche Pharmaceuticals of an experimental Polymerase Inhibitor (RO5024048 also known as RG7128) drug therapy for the virus. This document is the story of my illness and the experience of treatment. My lovely and pretty damn wonderful wife will be contributing her take on the experience as well.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Artificial Emotions

One of the stranger factors of being under the influence of drugs either experimental or otherwise, is the experience of emotional states that have no relation to your surrounding life circumstances.

Today, I was at the tail end of the working day, alone in the warehouse, finishing up some research on some new and interesting books that had just arrived. It is always enjoyable to be rooting through boxes and finding interesting and potentially valuable stuff hidden away amidst the general run-of-the-mill donations.

As an aside, I work for a non-profit Friends of the Library organization. The part of the organization I work in collects donations of used books and then sells them to raise money for the library. I have experience in the used and rare book field and am specifically tasked with finding the more valuable items and then, generally, selling them through online sales venues like Amazon.com, eBay, and Abebooks.com.

I went upstairs to my desk to finish up some last minute email correspondence and order processing when wham, I was suddenly sad, depressed and tired. Not the tired at the end of the day sort of thing, but the can’t-keep-your-eyes-open kind of tired. My wife called to let me know she was leaving her office and heading out to pick me up and I felt like crying just listening to her. Combining the sadness and fatigue got me right into a great little minor depression. Then when I got home I collapsed in front of the TV for a bit and felt like weeping while watching a bit of the movie "Dave." Now as anyone who has seen this movie knows it is not exactly a three hanky movie. None of this had anything to do with what was going on in my actual life. It was entirely caused by the drugs.

Luckily I knew what was going on. I could actually step back a bit, mentally, and realize that even though I felt bad, it had nothing to do with reality. Maintaining that perspective will be a challenge, but at least I am starting off knowing that it can happen.

This is one of those times that having experience with mind-altering drugs, particularly hallucinogens, is clearly going to be a benefit. I know intimately that small amounts of drugs can have overwhelming effects on your mental and emotional condition. LSD, for instance has powerful effects at a dosage of 300 micrograms, which is an astonishingly small amount of substance. It’s not just that you see your grandmother crawling up you leg with a knife in her teeth, as Hunter Thompson put it, but that suddenly you can be ecstatically happy and within moments be consumed with abject horror. Anyone who has taken LSD or any mind-altering drug can relate to these effects.

The key for folks who may not have any experiences like this is to try to maintain a bit of distance from your own feelings. This can be very difficult to do as you absolutely FEEL that you are sad, depressed and unhappy and it is tricky to separate this very real feeling you are experiencing from the actual circumstances of your life at that moment. This can be particularly challenging to do over time especially as the drugs bring on anemia, exhaustion, muscle weakness or other side effects that genuinely start to make you feel crappy. This is where keeping a journal; even one with very brief entries can help. It doesn’t have to be extensive, just a quick note about the actual circumstances perhaps contrasted with what feelings you are experiencing.

The other big helper is a support group. Keeping in touch with a group of folks who are either going through the same thing as you are right now, or have done so before can be of enormous support. Checking the web for support groups in your area is a first step. If you are not convenient to a physical group there are lots of blogs and bulletin boards out there as well with people who are more than willing to chat with you. The links on the side go to a lot of those resources.

The long-term struggle will be to remember that it is the drugs that are causing many of the feelings. That will be considerably difficult during this trial as it goes on for a minimum of 24 weeks. Even really powerful acid is usually gone in 24 hours

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