My shit's fucked up

I put off writing this for an hour or so this morning, to see if my mood would improve, but instead it's darkening, so I suppose I'd better get the blog out of the way before things get worse. I got the news from Judy on Tuesday: I still have a viral load. It's still less than ten, but it's still there. It hasn't moved. So I go to the lab on Monday and get poked one more time to see if anything has changed. I asked Judy, "So, at what point do we stop tacking on another two weeks?" She said, "When you have a negative result," but what I meant was, at what point do we give up, and she knew it. When I did ask the question she told me it's up to me.

Okay. Very well. I've thought about it and my decision is that if I still have a viral load next week, I'm going to stop the treatment. I draw the line at six extra weeks. It's obvious that my virus has stopped responding. Each time I've been tested the response has been less, until now, when the response is nil. There seems to be no point in continuing this expensive, wearying treatment if it's not going to help anything.

I find myself hoping that I do still have a viral load next week so that I'll have a legitimate excuse to stop the treatment. I can't breathe. When I can't breathe I have anxiety, and because the cause of the anxiety is physical and not going away, I can't control it and I end up with full-blown panic attacks. If I'm not in the middle of a panic attack, it's just under the surface, ready to strike. I quit drinking coffee to see if that would help. It didn't. I quit smoking, not so much to see if it would help as because it's no fun to smoke when I can't breathe, but I was hoping for some improvement. It's early days yet (I'm only on day five), but so far there has been no improvement at all. My trampoline arrived on Wednesday, but I can't jump on it because I can't breathe. I'm lightheaded all the time, and my hands and feet start to tingle if I walk to the car too quickly. My tinnitus is so bad that it causes thoughts of ritual suicide. I'm used to having a rushing or roaring sound in my ears, but lately it's a high-pitched whining, a constant sound like the most annoying mosquito in the world has set up housekeeping just outside my ear. Actually, it's the noise you hear just before you faint. I know because I've fainted a few times in my life (low blood-pressure), and that's what it sounds like just before everything goes black and I hit the floor. Only I don't faint, so it just goes on and on.

I'm wallowing in self-pity at the moment, but from where I sit right now, it feels justified. For at least the last six years, I have been making conscious efforts to improve the circumstances of my life, to alleviate the poverty, the drudgery and the loneliness which have been my lot for as long as I can remember, and nothing I've tried has worked. Last year I took a good long look at that pattern and concluded that there was something within me which was not allowing me to get what I wanted. So I worked steps specifically on that, and I endured an extremely painful series of internal changes, leading to a different kind of faith and trust in my higher power. What I asked for was to be shown the way out of the rut I kept finding myself in, over and over, to be shown the way toward what I really wanted. I've made some changes in the last six or seven months, tried some new things, tried some new ways, and everything I've tried has failed. And not only have I not been shown how to alleviate the poverty, the drudgery and the loneliness, but my burden has been made heavier with poor health. First it was the hypothyroidism; now it's the breathlessness.

When I began the Interferon treatment I made a decision to focus on just that for the year of the treatment. I felt that it would be enough to deal with. But I have to live my life in the meantime. I can't just take a vacation from my life while I'm being treated for Hepatitis C. I still have to go to work at my dull job, which I hate so much that I can barely force myself to go to it every day and barely force myself to do any work while I'm there, which I hate so much that I'm beginning to dislike my two co-workers, both of whom are really nice women. And I still have to go to meetings and do my best to listen with tolerance and generosity and to participate with something constructive. I still have to do my best to maintain the few friendships I have. And right now I feel I don't have enough energy to do any of those things. I can't do all of this shit if I can't breathe.

I was grateful for the breathlessness, in a way, when I made the decision to quit smoking. It had given me a taste of what emphysema must feel like, and my response was, "No thanks." There's nothing worse than not being able to breathe. At least my breathlessness is temporary. At least, I hope it is. I talked to Judy about it and asked if an inhaler would help. She said she's had a few patients with this problem and they were helped by using an inhaler. But did I get a prescription for an inhaler? No, I did not. She discussed my problem with the doctor on call (Dr H is on vacation), and he said it sounded like the breathlessness was triggering anxiety in me. No shit. And that was all he said. Thanks, Dr Shithead. I couldn't have figured that out for myself? I could lower my dosage of Ribavirin, which is the culprit for the breathlessness, but Dr H said that the patients who have the most success are the ones who can tolerate the full dosage of Ribavirin for the entire treatment. I'm not looking like a big success already; if I lower the Ribavirin dosage I'll have even less chance of clearing the disease.

So that's where things stand at the moment. If I find the silver lining I'll write about it.