Interferon Revisited

The plan own my arrival was to jump feet first back into my interferon treatment for at least 4 weeks. After four weeks if the viral load hadn’t dropped there wasn’t any point of continuing. A double edge sword, it makes you feel worse than you may have ever felt in your life, but to get the cure, you have to keep chug, chug, chugging along.

The protocol consisted of three different types of meds, two taken orally, daily and the other taken once a week via a shot. So my sister in law, the nurse, gave me my first shot Tuesday evening and I popped a total of five pills that evening. Nothing right off the bat, no Bruce Banner moment, no David Naughton moment morphing into a werewolf in a London flat. Nothing, quite anti-climactic thankfully. All in all I’d get one shot a week, 84 pills a week plus the 70 I was currently taking along with the occasional 120ml of liquid lactulose syrup and the often needed Ambien.

The night held nothing for me, not until at least one or two in the morning, I don’t know for sure, because sometime around that hour is when I had the onslaught of bombarding proteins and medicines. Odd how something that is supposed to help you causes so much discomfort. Those are the doctor’s words, not mine, discomfort is putting it mildly. It’s like calling an open schrapnel wound an ant bite; disembowment a mild case of dysentery and a severed head merely a flesh wound. Shit! FUCK! Piss!!!! There hasn’t been any cuss words to describe how I felt, every cell, every fiber, every last part of me was screaming out in pain, looking for some release. I could hear my self moaning and screaming or so I thought, apparently I wasn’t or at least I wasn’t loud enough to wake anyone else in the house. If you’ve ever had such a severe case of the flu where you where shivering gold and sweating one minute, feverish the next, nausea but nothing coming out; head in vice grips. My collar bone ached like it had been shattered, the muscles in my hands and hips where seized up and I could feel the roots of my teeth aching in their sockets. It reminded me of heroin withdraw if anything, only worse. I was able to doze in and out of sleep, waking up, screaming and sweating and shivering then spending the next day wrapped in layers upon layers of blankets until I felt so feverish I ran a cold shower and shivered on the tub floor until I felt I cooled off.

Friday I was to see my new Hepatologist in Indie and it couldn’t come soon enough, I was suffering from fatigue, malaise and reverse sommnia and adrenal fatigue syndrome. Jackpot was hit when Doctor Lacerda took me off the meds. His reasoning, the symptoms and suffering generally doesn’t outweigh the benefits and he suspects I’ll have a new liver soon enough and we can address the other issues then. Yippee… my hero. I’m still working out some of the symptoms of the meds, apparently they’re cyclical and I can expect them to be in my bod for a brief more couple of weeks. My next appoint with the good doctor is December 2 and he seems to think I’ll have a transplant before then. One can only hope.

When I’m not wrapped up in blankets and have enough energy to do something other than surf the television I’m spending my time, trying, and trying to be productive. Today is actually the first day where I’ve had enough energy to get out and spend some real time outside the house.

Yesterday I met with a psychologist who can hopefully help me get through this transplant process in a positive fashion, possibly help me find some faith and deal with issues that may arise in my relationships. The whole goal of suffering through this process is to come out the other end with a better quality of life.

Finding myself with enough energy this morning I was out of the house by 8 o’clock and on the expressway to Cincinnati in rush hour traffic. Nice, foggy and not bad at all by Boston standards. I found my way to Oakley Square, my old stomping grounds. Hell, how things had changed. The library was torn down and rebuilt, my old school was now a whole foodish type of joint, the movie theater I first saw Peter Pan at and later would break into and mess about in the projection room was falling apart. The butcher shop and grocery was now a bar, the square was lined with yuppie baby stores, brass fixture shops and overpriced ladies boutiques.

Fortunately some things did stay the same. St Cecelia still stood strong, Courtesy Chevrolet where my buds and I would drop through the roof and sit in the cars was (at least until we got arrested) still there. And of course the church of Christ where I got molested by the mortician that buried my Uncle Ted and Grandfather Still survived resiliently.