I’m still alive 🙂

Talked to the Doctor personally today. Said please please please don’t take me off riba, can I have procrit? If it will make you feel better I’ll go get a transfusion too! He says ok. I say ok, do you want me to get the transfusion? He says I can hold off, he’ll look at my most recent results and call me tomorrow. Based off of conversations with other nurses and patients, and the fact that I know it takes procrit four weeks to reach maximum effect, if it works at all, I am starting to feel that the transfusion might actually be the prudent thing to do even though I realllllllly don’t want one.

In the meantime I went to the GP on campus basically just to get someone else’s eyes on my lab results and to have her listen to my heart. Heart was normal, but she said considering my numbers she would feel better if she could get me to one of the hepatologists at our university so that I would have someone here in town in case of emergency. At this point I have a totally foolish reaction and instead of thinking about my treatment I get totally excited because this means I will get to meet some world famous hep c experts. I’ll probably freak them out by acting like the president of a fan club rather than a patient.

Interesting side note: Hep C and its treatment SCARES general practitioners. They don’t want anything to do with treating side effects of treatment. This campus doc (who is affiliated with a big city hospital) didn’t even want to write the procrit for me because of lack of familiarity with it. I’ve seen this a couple of times now. I understand it, but I also wish that they would familiarize themselves with it, especially with such a shortage of specialists in rural areas.

I also met with the program coordinator and explained the situation. Told her that originally I didn’t anticipate this interfering much with actual class time but that now it appears I might need some interventions and that I wanted her to know my situation ahead of time. She was really compassionate and intelligent about it, and it turns out her husband is an infectious disease specialist, like my doctor. She was very convinced that I did need to tell the other professors about my diagnosis and treatment so that they could all watch out for me and make sure labs and clinicals will be safe for me to participate in. I did take her advice and talked to two other professors, I still have a few more to talk to, but they were all very professional about it and didn’t seem to harbor any stigma at all.

Well I’m tired and tomorrow will be another long day of figuring out what the heck to do about this situation, so good night all (yes I realize it is 6:30 but I don’t care :P)