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.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Getting’ Sweaty

Hep C can certainly play havoc with your laundry schedule. This next piece of information may be revealing a bit more about our home life than my wife is comfortable with, but we generally change our sheets and such on a weekly basis. I know there are some of you out there who change linens on a daily basis. I also know there are some of you out there who change sheets somewhat less than on a weekly basis, some of you (you all know who you are) way less than that. Weekly has always seemed to be a reasonable interval to me.

No doubt that has something to do with my upbringing. My mother did our sheets on a weekly basis. The bed-changing day was a big day. We got to tear everything on our beds apart and drag the sheets down the hall to the bathroom where the laundry chute was. For those of you who never lived in a house with more than one floor or without a basement, a laundry chute is narrow chute running from the top floor down through the house, with doors on all intervening floors, that ends up in basement. Usually there is a box placed beneath it wherein all the laundry thrown down the chute collects and from there is dragged to the laundry room, sorted and washed. You threw your sheets down the chute, stuck your head in after and watched them slide down and end up in the box. When you are six or so, it is a great deal of fun. Sometimes, not that I ever did this of course, a large pile of clothes was left in the chute and an individual climbed into the chute and slid down into the pile of clothes – with a much harder landing than the individual supposed there would be.

Having this weekly event indelibly etched in my mind, my adult life was similarly patterned, except of course when I single and living in a warehouse and had not the motivation to launder bed linens so frequently. That being in the past, my wife and I have comfortably lived with a weekly pattern for some considerable time.

Interferon sure puts the kibosh on all that. Last night was a prime example. I injected in the early evening and we went to bed at our usual time of around 10:30. By midnight I was up and had sweated enough to soak the undershirt I was sleeping in. I changed, hanging the other to dry. By 3:00 I was awake and soaked through again so I changed again, hung again and went back to sleep. Waking at 4:30 to serious dampness again, I changed, hung and went back to bed; a three shirt night. Needless to say the sheets were a bit damp as well, at least on my side of the bed.

This used to happen each and every week a few months ago during the early weeks of treatment. I would change the sheets on Saturday, sweat like a pig that night, change the sheets on Sunday, and lather, rinse, repeat. You get the picture. Every week was a marathon of linen washing, not to mention the sheer number of t-shirts I went through. I haven’t been that intimate with a washing machine since my mother made me “help” her with the laundry when I was a lad.

Luckily all that had calmed down a bit and we were down to only having to change the linens maybe twice weekly. Until this dose. I wish my damn body would just adjust to these meds and give me some sense of consistency. Maybe it has to do with being off the experimental drug? But if I am going to go back to multiple washings and changings per week, we may need to invest in a dryer. Hanging all those sheets to dry every week makes us look like we are operating something more than just a single family home over here.

Really folks, its just me, getting sweaty with my meds, the old-fashioned way. And only 35 more weeks to go – maybe a new washer too…

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