I’ve been away from this blog for a while. That’s good news for people who have hepatitis C. I was among the first few patients to receive direct-acting antivirals in 2014. Within six weeks my viral count was nearly nothing. In six months, it was nothing. In another six months, my liver, which had been on the edge of cirrhosis, was back to normal. The good news about dragging my feet on writing this blog? It’s that a few years after being cured some people can almost forget that they ever had hepatitis C. * Occasionally, though, something brings the disease back to top-of-mind. That happened t ..read more

With World Hepatitis Day coming next month, I’ve been looking back to where the world was five years ago when I was diagnosed, when the world of hep C treatment had just begun to change. I didn’t come fast enough for me, a least I thought so five years ago today. My biggest memory of the time was that I was freaked out. I was freaked out because I had learned I had contracted hepatitis C. I didn’t know how I had contracted it. The only approved treatment was interferon, a debilitating drug with no promise of a cure. I was waiting for an appointment with a gastroenterologist. It was more than t ..read more