Treatment: To Get, Or Not To Get!

It seems to me that there’s a common pattern among a lot of Hepatitis C sufferers – and I’m a textbook case! First you find out you’ve got the disease. Then you find out about the treatment (nasty side effects, no guarantee of success) and you vow never to have it. Instead, you decide you’re going manage your disease by living a healthy lifestyle and looking after your liver.
Eventually, however, you find out more about the treatment. You find out that maybe it’s not as bad as you imagined. You realise there’s some hope that it might fix you. And suddenly you’ve joined the ranks of the predictables.
When I got my diagnosis, the first thing I thought of was Pamela Anderson. Since she was so famous (the poor woman), her Hep C story had been all over the news. I’d never heard of Hep C before that, but I had been curious, because she was saying that she only had another ten years to live and other weird stuff (I read later that she had only been joking when she said that – which is weird in itself).
After my own diagnosis, I looked up those Pamela news items again, to see what she had to say about it. One thing that stuck out was that she said she would never have the treatment. Instead, she was going to eat well, look after her liver, etc, etc. You know the scenario.
Anyway, this isn’t a blog about Pamela Anderson, so I’ll move back to ME in a second, but I just want to say that the next time I heard anything about her, it was that she was taking a year off her career to have THE TREATMENT!
So then I was the only person left that I could find who was against treatment.
I complained to my husband that when I searched the Internet for people like me, the only people I found were the ones supporting each other through the treatment. Where were the people supporting each other through living with the disease? The thing is, though, I imagine that if you’ve decided to live with it, you don’t need support after a while because you’d need to put it behind you and get on with living with it.
So I’ll get to my point: Right from the beginning I insisted that I would never, ever let anyone talk me into having the treatment. I was in the doctor’s waiting room, and I was still sure that I wasn’t going to let him talk me into the treatment. When the doctor called my name and I walked into his office, I reminded myself that I wasn’t going to do what I knew he was going to suggest, which was to get the treatment.
By the time I left his office, I was convinced that getting the treatment was a good idea.
And then I started getting comments on my blog, congratulating me on my decision to go ahead with treatment, and I just had to laugh. It was like all these people were out there just waiting for me to make the inevitable decision that they knew I was going to, so they could congratulate me. Of course they weren't, because I'm not the centre of the universe.

I haven't started my treatment yet, but when I do, I'll be one of those people reading new blogs from people vowing never to have the treatment, and I'll wait patiently for them to change their minds, putting no pressure on them, but being there for them when it's time give them congratulations, help and support.

The Dreaded Biopsy

Today I received a letter in the mail, telling me that my liver biopsy will be on 2 March. Cor… I’m shaking in my boots.
I’ll be making the four-hour drive to the city the night before, so I can get into the hospital by 7:30am, to have an ultrasound to decide which is the best spot to take a chunk out of my liver. Then I’ll be placed on a wheelbarrow, have a tube stuck into my arm, and wheeled around the hospital until 9:20 when they’ll give me a "drug which will make me sleepy" through the tube in my arm. Then they'll get a gigantic shovel and dig a few chunks out of my liver.
Then, I have to lie in my wheelbarrow on my right side for four hours while they monitor me to make sure I’m not going to croak.
Oh, and a week beforehand, I have to go to my local hospital for yet another blood test. This time they’re going to keep a note of what my blood type is, so that they can have some on standby for my biopsy, in case something goes wrong and I need a blood transfusion.
Oh, but it's OK, they tell me, there are only a few things that can go wrong, like accidentally punching a hole in my lung with the gigantic shovel.
Oh yes, I’m really looking forward to my first-ever surgery experience.