Night Sweats Redux

After finishing 18 months of treatment involving powerful, side-effect laden drugs one’s expectations are that once you are no longer taking the drugs, you no longer experience the side effects. This does not exactly seem to be the case. Shortly after the first week following the end of treatment, I began to experience night sweats again.

Within a few months of beginning the drug trial in 2010, I started to experience night sweats, as related in this post. The night sweats were intense with heavy sweat soaking through sleeping clothes and even requiring changing the sheets in some cases. These went on for several weeks until my body seemed to adjust to the various drugs and they receded to only an occasional event. This was the norm for about a year until they became a bit more common during the final 8 weeks of treatment. They were still not the heavy sweats that characterized the early part of treatment, but they did happend a few times a month toward the end.

About ten days after finishing treatment, I woke up on my back with a pool of sweat on my concave abdomen (did I mention that I had lost a bit of weight?). After a change of shirt and going back to sleep, I awoke later to the same condition. This happened three times during the night and by morning there were damp shirts hung all over the bedroom. It was unclear why it might be happening. My wife had recently had the flu and I was a bit feverish before retiring for the night so perhaps it was related to that. When it happened each night for the next week, it occurred to me that it might be related to the HEP C treatment. The heavy sweats have stopped, but in a milder form they have remained an event that occurs about 3 times a week.

It is not clear what the cause is. In my darkest moments, I remember that the symptoms for the onset of acute HEP C are flu-like, including fever, sweating and muscle aches. I felt some of them at the start of this round of sweats but it does not seem likely the sweating would have continued on for several weeks after the other symptoms disappeared. In talking to folks who have had relapses after treatment, they report that they relapse within the first month, which would fit the scenario, but they do not report having symptoms. It could also be related to stopping the other drugs being taken to alleviate the side effects of the standard treatment. Ambien was something I was taking every day for the final 2-3 months of treatment as sleep was not something that came easily or often. Ambien is not something that should be taken daily and even Dr. Sue had been more worried about the addictive nature of that than of any of the other drugs I was taking. There are some withdrawal symptoms that are noted for Ambien, but they do not indicate that they would go on for weeks after stopping. It could be that the long term use of interferon and Ribavirin has reset my internal thermostat. It always ran cold before as witnessed by the pile of covers on my side of the bed every night. Perhaps now it is more like my wife’s internal temperature gauge. She often sleeps covered only by a sheet on nights when I am swathed in blankets.

I hope it is something as benign as my body permanently running warmer than it used to. If nothing else, surviving summers in San Francisco will be easier if running hot, than if constantly cold. Until more evidence is gathered, the jury is out. In the meantime I am busy brainwashing myself that it is NOT because of any recurrence of HEP C.