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.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Hepatitis C and Fantasy Baseball: The Auction

I spent the last 5 days in (mostly) sunny Los Angeles. I was there for my fantasy baseball auction. This is an event in which grown men (mostly) pretend they are baseball general managers and buy a team of actual major league players. This becomes “your” team and you use the actual statistics they accumulate during the year to determine who wins your league.

I have been doing this for 25 years and have gathered a certain level of experience at it as well as a number of beliefs about how best to proceed at the actual process of buying players and assembling a team. A great deal of this accumulated wisdom (a tricky term to apply to this sort of experience, but there it is) had to be thrown out for this auction as the facts of Hepatitis C treatment intruded on the natural rhythms of the fantasy world.

The auction started at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday. I generally inject Interferon on Thursday night. I have determined that the side effects of the Interferon, both mental and physical generally start to hit about 14 to18 hours after the injection. They peak in the 36 to 48 hour period and then gradually lessen until the next injection. I delayed my injection until Friday night around 10:00 p.m. This would mean that the side effects would most likely start to hit from noon till 4:00 p.m. Saturday, I would have a solid 3 hours and possibly as many as 6 before I lost my edge, such as it is. I also realized I had to create a strategy that allowed me to buy most of my players before I started to feel physically sick and mentally spaced out.

One of the tenets of auction theory is that people involved in the auction tend to get caught up in the emotional intensity of the moment and pay too much early in the process. As the auction proceeds and people run out of money, bargains can be had if you are patient enough and a canny judge of talent. This requires concentration and attention over a several hour process. Hah! I say. The side effects timing I mentioned above make that kind of long term concentration impossible, at least for this particular patient. The strategy I devised was to choose actual players that I wanted on my team and buy them in the auction no matter what the price. I made educated guesses as to how much all the available players would be expected to cost. Within those general guidelines, I chose players that would fit my budget and help my team. I went to the auction intending to buy mostly those players and thus I would not have to concentrate on every player just the ones I intended to buy.

It worked far better than I expected. I needed to buy 15 players to fill out my team. I managed to buy 12 of the players I had picked before the auction. I only had to fill 3 positions from the general group of players. The down side to this success is that I have no one to blame but myself if my team is awful.

I was a good thing it worked because, like clockwork, the nausea hit at about 1:30 and I really noticed my concentration lagging from about 2:00 p.m. on. By the time 3:00 p.m. rolled around and the auction was over, I was spent.

This is all really just an example for any specific event or activity that you do while you are undergoing treatment. Successfully completing activities, classes, or special events and occasions is all about planning. Determine what your own body and mind are capable of for given days and time frames and plan your involvement with activities around those capabilities. If it means that you change the way you normally or traditionally do things, make those changes. It will mean all the difference in your enjoyment of the activity or event and your success in completing it. You are the only one who knows what your capabilities are and you are the one who needs to both plan for those capabilities and let others know what they are. This way, no one is surprised and/or disappointed by the level of involvement you can bring to an event.

By the way, the 2010 Black Shadows team is:

John Baker C Florida
Miguel Olivo C Colorado
Adam LaRoche 1B Arizona
Brandon Phillips 2B Cincinnati
Ryan Theriot SS Chicago
Freddy Sanchez 2B San Francisco
Mark DeRosa 3B San Francisco
Jeff Baker 3B Chicago
Jay Bruce OF Cincinnati
Shane Victorino OF Philadelphia
Conor Jackson OF Arizona
Marlon Byrd OF Chicago
Garret Jones OF Pittsburgh
Scott Hairston OF San Diego

Wandy Rodriguez SP Houston
Barry Zito SP San Francisco
Aaron Harang SP Cincinnati
Brett Myers SP Houston
Tedd Lilly SP Chicago
Paul Maholm SP Pittsburgh
Chris Volstad SP Florida
David Bush SP Milwaukee
Jeremy Affeldt RP San Francisco
Sean Gallagher RP San Diego
Sam Gervacio RP Houston

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