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.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Too Much Private Life

One of the issues that crops up in records of this nature, is that they can rapidly degenerate into obsessive recountings of the day-to-day minutiae of the life of the person going through the experience. This is all well and good, but the issues of the disease Hepatitis C and the process of treatment, both Standard Of Care and Experimental, are issues that are much larger than merely how they intersect one individual’s life. These are concerns that I mean to address in the near future of this record. I want to talk about how I made some of the decisions I made both in the context of my personal life and in the general context of the medical life of people in the USA. I can’t really address the situation of someone who has Hep C and is living with the disease or undergoing treatment in countries with government-funded health care systems. I just don’t know enough about the issues and the wide range of government health care systems in the world.

Today, unfortunately, I am waylaid by the personal and just have no energy at all to try to put together anything thoughtful. It is only 7:30 p.m. and I can barely keep my eyes open. I am noticing that I am much more sensitive to cold and getting chilled; that merely going and doing a bit of shopping with my wife was an experience of wandering around stores in a fog and coming home thoroughly tired. And, thoroughly humiliating to the Midwestern-raised guy I am, I couldn’t even carry the damn basket around the store, I had to follow my wife around while she carried everything heavy. Not a big deal to many, but to the sixth-decade American male, most unmanly.

Luckily at home I have a bathtub and after a hot bath to get some warmth into my bones, and a bit of soup, I was warm, exhausted, not unduly discontent and ready to hit the hay for a few moments of reading before sleep.

I promise I will post some more widely applicable content soon, really, I mean it, as soon as I wake up…

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