Week 1, Part 1: a ramble

Owee, I think I am discovering what "acceptable" side-effects are. Remember all those people who told you how harsh this treatment was? They were not shitting you. It ain't interferon, either!

Unlike poor people with HIV I am only going to suffer this horror for 12 weeks, at most. My heart goes out to them.

Anyway, this is a Saturday ramble, as opposed to a Sunday attempt to be rational. This is what happens, and what goes through my mind, especially in the 3-4 hours after I eat my incivek+ribavirin (which is about half of my waking time; side-effects begin about 30 minutes after ingestion, peak out around 3 hours later and fade rapidly. Notice that my essential disgust with the medications (which may still grow into hatred) does not affect my continuing rational approach: it is simply what must be done, and it will be done. However, I reserve the right to piss and moan about it.

Incivek is a rather dull purple colour, and ugly a priori--you should trust this pill no further than you can throw it in high-gravity environment, and perhaps not even that far; ribavirin is a pretty deep celestial blue pill (not sky-blue, unless you are on some poisoned world): the colour one associates with alien venoms, with toxic waste, with visitors from the planet where all organic life was brutally destroyed and replaced with self-replicating pretty bright blue pills. :)

Taste, irritability, flu!

Taste: as I was eating a chile verde chicken burrito the other day, I suddenly realized that it tasted like a cross between some swampy mushroom and the smell of a meat dumpster rotting in the sun. I thought that my burrito was off, but the next day, eating another one, from a different package, I realized that that is what all of them are going to taste like now. One of the side effects is the alteration of taste perception. So far avocados and peanut butter and cheese are still edible; thinking about Thai food (!!!) caused mild nausea yesterday. Thai food!!!!!!

Irritability: I have noticed that my default response to people is getting snippier by the minute. I have never had much patience with idiots, online or otherwise, but was polite by default in the past; I think that now I could be called a curmudgeonly militant atheist asshole with some justification. Finally! That's not a bad thing, really.

Flu-like symptoms: Since I have not had flu since at some point, er, sometime before I lost my virginity, I didn't know what to expect. This is what flu feels like? Flu-like symptoms? Fuck this shit. I feel sorry for all of you people who get it om a regular basis: from now on I shall never skip mt flu-shot, just to make for sure for sure that I don't feel like that ever again.

So that's a recap of my side-effectiveness this last week, the first of 12...:( And now, let's talk about the virus itself. The fucker is an amazingly nifty little beastie: it is not highly pathogenic, and is only weakly transmissible (you pretty much HAVE to take blood from an infected person and rub it into fresh cuts in your skin to get it) but yet, it is incredibly hardy. Here's a dichotomy for you: 25% of the people clear it by themselves. 8-28% develop cirrhosis (over 20-30 years). (Hah! look at that spread in numbers: that reflects the fact that heavy(ish) drinkers have almost 7 times higher risk of developing it). 2-7% die from cirrhosis and liver cancer. That's from CDC. Again, I am not entirely comfortable with such a spread. So yes: it is weak and not that big of a deal--at least until your liver hardens up and begins to scar, at which point things can deteriorate rather rapidly. On the other hand, the fucking monsterling can survive for a long-ass time outside of the body. As in, 48 hours or more; compare it to the wimpy half and hour after which HIV gives up whatever ghost it possesses. And, its systemic effects are also a cool demonstration of evolutionary principles: by interfering with liver function, it messes with your clotting factors and lowers your platelet count, thereby increasing the frequency with which you bleed (my nosebleeds are a good goddamn example!) and the amount you bleed out before it clots--thereby sending trillions more of copies of itself into the wild blue yonder, to look for another warm and friendly home to fuck up. Damn, I swear the viral colony in my bloodstream and liver is planning ahead, and not half-badly. The nastier side-effects are probably due to their attempts to manipulate my behaviour to get me to drop out of treatment. But I won't! Nyaah nyaah stupid virus!!!

The funny thing is that I feel just fine mentally (perhaps even TOO fine--haha! heehee! on occasion, I do get quite manic). I am walking around, singing three tunes at once, while writing this and contemplating the problems of the effects of complex feedbacks on the albedos of Terrestrial planet atmtmospheres. All the while my body feels like it's been stuck in a blender with a half a ton of bricks and set to pulverize for an hour or so. Yet somehow that does not dampen my generally awesome mood. Weird, that. My hypothesis is that after the awful oppressiveness of achiness and spaciness and inability to remember my ABCs for about half an hour after my 1700 dose of medicine, regularly nasty "flu-like symptoms" come as a bloody relief and my mind responds with happiness and glee.

I can only hope that in 11 more weeks I'll be able to dress like John Cleese, and with a Hungarian phrasebook in my hands go to a tobacconist where I'll be able to tell some cute punky maid, "Come to my place, bouncy bouncy. I am no longer infected!" :D