check your iron/ferritin levels....... complete iron profile.

Hi dBo! Are you the long-lost sibling I never knew I had? ;-)

I finished therapy in September of 2005, so it's been 18 months since the last
shot of Peg and mouthful of Riba. As you've read, I had a really good scare
(or is that a really bad scare?) but it wasn't the hep making a come-back. To
this day I don't know what the hell it was - so I've relegated *most* of it to
the "must have been the fricken flu" bin.

It's amazing what the body will sacrifice to keep the core running when faced
with severe anemia. Along with the 40+ pounds I lost, my muscle condition
really went in the toidy. Although I only missed one day of work while on
therapy, it was a desk job that I toddled to and from each day, and for sure I
had zero energy beyond just making it through the day.

To this point the muscle tone is hugely improved but still not all the way
back (and perhaps it will never be - I'm getting old ;-) The good news is,
after going from 235 to just a scoche over 190, I've been holding steady at
210 with a BMI under 25. Makes my PCP happy, makes my insurance rep happy,
even makes the spousal unit happy. It's all good :-)

I think I'm pretty much over the aches and pains of treatment, with two
exceptions:

One, I am almost certain treatment aggravated the diverticulosis that my
&#%@*! gastro doc forgot to tell me about when he did my colonoscopy a couple
of years before therapy. I'm pretty sure my ascending colon popped a whole
bunch of new and/or bigger pockets, and I attribute that change to the overall
physical degradation caused by therapy (and coupled with all the other
symptoms I was having post-tx, it sure seemed like a relapse was the only
explanation). I won't know for sure until the next 'scoping, which ought to
happen in 2008 (ugh).

Two, the skin on my hands was totally trashed during the winter of '05. At the
worst point they were a mass of bleeding cracks, which transitioned to a mass
of scar tissue. No amount of lotion, including prescription stuff, sleeping
with cotton gloves covering handfuls of ointments, did anything to help. Now,
it doesn't take much to for the skin at the sides of my finger joints to crack
wide open again, especially if I'm doing work in my shop.

Minor stuff, to be sure, compared to what many others are dealing with. All in
all, I'm doing great, and happy to be living without the dragon...

Spring WILL make a HUGE improvement in your daily outlook. Even before I got
the 6 month post-tx SVR test results in late March, the lovely weather we had
last Spring embraced me with its warmth and made the outdoors something I
didn't need to recoil from as I had the previous two Winters (which is really
something for someone who has been a die-hard skier since he was five years
old).

Cheers - and hope you draw the lucky SVR card when your test comes up!

/greyhackles