User Profile

This is a journal I've set up specifically to document my journal through chemotherapy for Hepatitis C. This is a public journal, and is designed to help other people facing HCV chem treatment in finding out what to expect.

I'm a 46-year-old gay male living in Northern California. I've had chronic Hepatitis C since at least 1985 (when it was diagnosed as "Non-A, Non-B") and was one of the first cases of Hep C my physician diagnosed (thanks to improved blood tests) in 1990.

A nondrinker and nonsmoker, I figured my risk factors were low. Several years ago, a series of medical problems left me nearly 40 pounds heavier. At the same time, my "bad" blood score tests for Hep C began rising slowly.

In early 2007, I went to a hepatologist at UCSF who ended up doing a liver biopsy, and was formally diagnosed with Grade 2, Stage 3 Chronic Hepatitis C.

In mid-2007, I was accepted into an FDA Phase III Trials study taking place at UCSF.

This is a three-armed drug trial. The "control" arm treats patients with the current "gold standard" of pegylated interferon (weekly injection) and ribavirin (twice-daily pill). The two experimental arms of the study use different doses of the experimental drug. Subjects are placed into one of the three arms at random. All treatments are scheduled to be 48 weeks long.

In case you're wondering ... the orange spiky beachball thingy in my default icon is an electron microscope picture of the Hepatitis C virus.

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