
Hepatitis C Support Group
Hepatitis C is a blood-borne viral disease which can cause liver inflammation, fibrosis, cirrhosis and liver cancer. The hepatitis C virus (HCV) is spread by blood-to-blood contact with an infected person's blood. Many people with HCV infection have no symptoms and are unaware of the need to seek treatment. Hepatitis C infects an estimated 150-200 million people worldwide.

deleted_user
Wondering if anyone can help me with understanding what I'm up against. I will be visiting my doctor this thursday for an eval and treatment (not exactly sure what this means). My Internist doctor, using a blood test, told me I was HCV positive and the Vl was high (log10 6.696)
What I have read so far does not put a lot of concern on the Vl level and makes more reference to the biop.
However, it has been almost 3 weeks since learning of my condition and it does not seem my doctor is in a hurry to do anything.
Is this condition something you can live with - without treatment of some kind, a modified type treatement, the combination treatment I have been reading about?
Should I be concerned to get in and get it taken care of ASAP?
Any other answer you think my help me at this time would be great.
Help please !!!!!
What I have read so far does not put a lot of concern on the Vl level and makes more reference to the biop.
However, it has been almost 3 weeks since learning of my condition and it does not seem my doctor is in a hurry to do anything.
Is this condition something you can live with - without treatment of some kind, a modified type treatement, the combination treatment I have been reading about?
Should I be concerned to get in and get it taken care of ASAP?
Any other answer you think my help me at this time would be great.
Help please !!!!!
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Here is a list of things you should know, and do towards getting treated for your virus.
First your Primary Care Physician will refer you to a good gi, liver doctor. In your case, the program will refer you to a liver doctor.
The liver doctor will then proceed in getting the procudures, and tests required.
The first one if not done already will be the:
PCR blood test.
This will determine your genotype, which will reveal the lenght of the treatment, and the viral load, which will be needed to determine if you are a responder to these combo meds.
I do believe you told me that you were type 2 or 3, so this is only 24 weeks of therapy.
Then CBC blood test.
This is the complete blood count of his blood. The is very important, it will tell if you liver enzymes are in the normal range or not, check the thyroid, again see if it's working properly, maybe remind him to make sure your iron levels are normal.
The biopsy.
The biopsy is a procedure done at the hospital. They will sedate you a bit in order to keep you calm during the procedure. The doctor will insert a sort of long needle with pinches at the end, which will be inserted in direction of the liver, through the stomach, where they will pinch a few samples of your liver.
This will then determine the stage and grade of damage to your liver if any.
Also if fibrosis, or cirrohsis as set in.
Then you will be kepted at the hospital for a total of 4 hours, until you feel better, and they are sure that you won't bleed out. You will need to do nothing trenuous for the next 24 hours, then resume to his normal activity the next day. No lifting of course.
Recap:
1. genotype
2. viral load
3. iron
4. thyroid.
5. liver enzymes
6. stage of liver damage if any
7. grade of liver damage if any
8. fibrosis if any
9. Cirrohsis if any
10. If you qualify for tx.
If you should have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me. One more thing, you are allowed to get a copy of all of his blood work and his PCR results.
Hope this helps you out. Good luck to you.
Mckenzie
One day at the time.
ps: if you should have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to write me a message.
yep, I'm no good at the technical aspects of hepc, i try to provide encouragement and a kind word to those that are hurting. sometime that alone can make someones day.
slow down a little and don't let your emotions get the best of you. nothing is going to happen over night. you have plenty of time to gather information and do what is best for you.
take care,
joe
High Enz count would be your ALT and AST, most likely. Liver enzymes that when high, indicate liver being damaged by something.
My enzymes were high in March 2005, and my doctor did nothing about it. I did not get DX with Hep C until October 2006, and by then I was really sick. Too sick to do treatment, in fact.
I'm happy to say that with careful diet, supplements and other measures, I'm all better now, and the symptoms I had 2 1/2 years ago are gone, it took about 18 months for me to recover to feeling normal again.
So it is slow moving. Finding out about having it is traumatic! And many doctors now recommend a period of 6 months to adjust to the facts before beginning treatment.
Best wishes!
I read through what everyone else said but forgot most of it, so I'll likely repeat what the others have said.
First, don't worry about that viral load because it does not mean much at all. You can lower that just be cleaning up your life, what you eat stop drinking alcohol, and stuff like that. Your viral load becomes important only if you do tx and then you want that VL to go down quickly and then become undetectable. Otherwise it's just a number.
Let's see, what else? OK if you drink alcohol, stop. If you smoke, stop that too. It is supposed to give you better odds of clearing the virus on tx if you don't smoke.
Oh yeah, another thing. If you have a wee bit of excess weight, see what you can do about exercising some of it off. That excess weight is supposed to give you worse odds of clearing the virus.
Genotype 1A is the toughest to clear, with odds something like 60% or less, so you want to do what you can to be in the 40% group. Quit smoking and drinking, lose weight, and eat healthy LOL. Now how's that for a short list of things to do!
Yeah, you really need that biopsy. The gold standard is the one with the big hulking needle that quickly jabs into your body and grabs a little snip of your liver to see what's up in there LOL. It's really not as bad as it may sound, and it's over before you could sneeze. I just remember the sound of the needle from my biopsy, and found the dentist more traumatic! There are some new procedures that are not as intrusive to the body, but your dr can talk to you about what method should be used in your case to find out your stage and grade with regard to liver damage.
if you find that you have little or no damage or inflammation, you could decide to postpone doing any tx and instead just cleanup up your living to be more liver friendly. On the other hand, if the biopsy shows you have some damage/inflammation in the 2-3 range, you may want to consider doing tx.
Someone had mentioned that it may not even shorten your life, which is true. There are many people who have the virus and die WITH it, not FROM it. They never even knew they had it.
So sure you can live with the virus and never do tx! Tons of people have already decided that tx is just too rough to try, so they choose to cleanup their diet and live a liver friendly life.
But it all depends on the condition of your liver right now. It's not called the silent killer for no reason. You can have zero kind of symptoms but your liver is crap. So get your biopsy, then sit down with your dr to discuss all your results, viral load, genotype, stage, grade, and what would be best for you to do next.
Don't be too worried about all the waiting, in fact, get used to it. You will be waiting for this appt and that one, these results and the next ones. it's neverending. Just bring a bottle of water and a good book, and settle in for your turn.
There are lots of good people here with years of experience, so no matter what you find yourself up against, I am pretty sure that someone else here has gone through the same or similar.
To know the road ahead, ask the man coming back.
Now to put that into perspective. Let's look at the size of the Hep C virus. We will compare it to the Small pox virus, which is larger. 3,000 small pox viruses laid in a flat circle (no stacking) would be the size of a period in a book.
If you took one of them and made it the size of a brick, the cold virus would be the size of a blueberry and the Hep C virus would be 1/3 of that size. It is 30-35 nanometers across. A nanometer is 1/1,000,000,000,000 of a meter, which is about 39 inches. I don't know about you but I cannot conceive anything that small. How many of them would it take to cover the size of a period?
Point is that it's not going to kill you overnight, or in the next month or year. You have time to consider your options and decide what you want to do about it.
When I was diagnosed they told me that it generally takes 10 years from onset of symptoms if not treated to get cirrhosis.
I already had symptoms and was too sick to do treatment. So I reversed the symptoms and now I'm doing better. Now I'm waiting for a treatment that isn't so hard on the body!