My big fat non-event

I had my first injection yesterday. The pharmacy delivered my medication on Friday. I wasn’t able to do pre-dosing with my doctor, but I tried starting the Ribavirin two days early. I’m not sure if it will make any difference because I am not sure of how long it takes it to build up in your blood. Two days may not be long enough to help. I thought that an extra two days might help a bit though.

Yesterday at 4:00pm the nurse came to give my first shot. She also showed me how so I can give myself injections from now on. I also have a little instructional DVD that I am to watch a few times this week. Out of concern she is going to come back next Monday and watch me inject myself to make sure that I got it. Then she is coming the following Monday to look over my blood work. She says that I need to do blood work next Monday or Tuesday and then every two weeks after that for the first 4 months. I may have to do it more often if there is an issue. I am starting out with low hemoglobin already so that may be an issue.

At week four I do the Oh so important first Hepatitis C Viral Load (VL) test. If I am undetectable (have less than 50 copies of the Hep C virus in a measure of blood) then I am considered a quick responder. This would be most good. I would attempt a cartwheel if this happened. If I’m not a quick responder then they would want to see at least a 2-log drop. I still have trouble with this so I am going to take a bit from another blog, Ending the Stigma @ http://endingthestigma.blogspot.com/. If my VL were 100 a 2-log drop would mean a drop of two digits or going from 3 digits to 1. So 100 would go to 1. A VL of 1,000 would mean going from 4 digits to 2 so 1,000 to 10. Now I am not too sure what will happen with me since I am starting with a pretty high VL. My last VL was 14,000,000 (yes 14 million). So if I were to have a VL of 140,000 I would basically pass. Whew! This is the first time that I’ve done the math. That is quite a drop. I’ll have to do some serious finger crossing.

So what happened after the injection? Nothing really. It was really a non-event. I felt a little warm and sweated a little but not much. The nurse told me not to be surprised if I didn’t have a reaction to the first shot. She kind of inferred that some people don’t get them until the second, third or even later shots. So I told everyone that I didn’t seem to have any side effects. My Facebook status boasted that I lucked out. Now I have to admit that I may have tooted my horn a little too early. Today I feel a like you do when you are coming down with something. A little icky and a little achy. To make matters a little worse I was unable to get much sleep. I have a neighbour with mental health issues and she chose today to go off her meds. She spent most of the morning and a bit of the afternoon yelling things out in the hall. I’m not sure if she was talking to anyone or to the invisible people she talks too when she goes manic like this. I didn’t dare look out to see. The last time she did this she spent all weekend throwing her furniture out into the hall. Sofa, bed, tables, she must have been sleeping on the floor. Back then they took her away on Monday and she was in the hospital until she came back a few weeks ago. She was quiet so I thought that she had gotten level on some meds. So today is just like the last time. She is quiet for a while and then one day explodes. I hope that they get help for her quicker this time. The last time I was like a prisoner in my own apartment, being too afraid to encounter her in the hallway. I worry that she’ll hurt herself or someone else when this happens. So I am a little beat today after not getting much sleep.

Other than the ickyness from the injection the pills are kind of messing with my stomach giving me some gastrointestinal )GI side effects. Pretty well all of my HIV meds have come with GI side effects. I have spent the last 13 years of my life not wanting to be too far from a bathroom. Things seemed to have balanced out for the last few weeks. Now the Ribavirin has knocked things out of balance again.

I have two feelings when it comes to side effects. The first and most obvious one is, “Yipeee, I dodged that one!” The other feeling I have is that some side effects may be a sign that there is a big battle going on in my body. I had an experience with one of my HIV cocktails that made me feel this way. There was one cocktail that when I first took it I was pretty sick for the first two months and then things levelled out. I went off my meds for a while and then when I restarted them I was again pretty sick for two months. I took another holiday from the meds and when I started them for the third time I told my doctor that I knew what to expect. That I would be pretty sick for two months and then I’d adjust. I started the meds and nothing happened. I asked the doctor if that could mean that they were not working anymore. He said not to worry and that you can take a drug and have side effects and then another time not have any. The first two times I took the cocktail my HIV Viral Load dropped immediately and my CD4s skyrocketed. This third time my CD4s rose excruciatingly slow. It took me over a year for my CD4s to get back to where they were before I stopped the meds. A few years later my doctor said that I probably did develop a little resistance to the drugs and they were less affective now.

So I will see how this develops. Who knows, next Monday I may have posting saying “Yipeee! I feel like crap.”

Cheers,

David Mc Hep C