I have somewhat fond memories of using Interferon first time round. I was practice teaching at that time (change in career thing that never really went ahead long term). All very odd for me injecting this stuff into my self around my belly.

Main side effect was feeling like I had a hangover. Not a bad thing as I had well practiced this in my earlier youthful days anyway. The main problem was my appearance as being that of a man sweating like a pig in front of primary aged school kids. Continued this for a number of weeks until the medicos discovered it did not make any difference to the virus at all, so I quit.

The combination stuff was quite different to say the least. Side effects that much I very soon wondered if I could keep holding down a job! I DO NOT have fond memories of that stuff at all. Found I could not cope, and quit – for better or worse.

Mike, you being a teacher of things past, you may try to think this is combo stuff as (hopefully now was) probably the modern day chemical equivalent of medical practices during the American Civil War.

Yours

Jeff

P.S. They also tried me out on these Chinese herbal pills. They had a rather nice coating and were the size of a marble. The trick was to suck on them only just long enough to still have some coating to insulate your taste buds from the inner bits that both looked and tasted like dried dog shit. Taking them also turned my own shit into little pebbles as well. Eventually they found this made no difference and the medicos swiped what was left so I had to buy Mentos as a sugar hit replacement. I will be forever grateful to Hep C for giving me the opportunity to experience all this.

I am so grateful that I did not have to do interferon – it scares me so much, kudos goes to all the warriors here that had no choice but to tread this path of nightmares and pain. Im so happy that these new drugs are around to treat us. Shame on Gilead and their pricing that people are STILL having to be treated with interferon.

Agreed the Peg/Ifn was scary stuff but for me it was the ribavirin that wore me down. Being a slow responder I proceeded to up my riba dose from 1000mg to 1500mg daily at 12 weeks. By that point Id lost 10kg and was all of 68kg so overdosing riba big time. The IFN wasnt too bad until 72 hours after shot, then it was flu like. By the end of my 63 week tx I had a neut count of 0.2 and haemoglobin of 8. I was mentally and physically twisted and relapsed soon after. Really took 12 months to recover, i lost my short sight and any remaining youthful glow lol. Mate there were folk over at medhelp doing 72 weeks up to 108 weeks and multiple times. Fuck it would never have done that shit again. Em

Can relate to both posts Emilio, I won’t watch the film, it is fresh enough in my mind, bits of me broke but it didn’t kill me and made me strong! No regrets. For me in ways it was easier to manage life on the old style every second day interferon, although the sides were more intense, because I could time the onset of the symptoms pretty well exactly from taking it- shiver and shake through the night when kids were in bed etc. But the peg/intf, I was never quite sure when it would hit. I never got used to either sort, every dose was like the first.
But like you, sof dac is no problem, I could live on it happily, I hope I feel this good when I finish next week!

Yes. I relapsed after 48 week of peg-rib at 2006 with compensated F4 and 1b. Fortunately, there were no very serious side effects during therapy. There was an opportunity to undergo peg-telaprevir-riba therapy several years ago and many people recommended me to do this due to F4… My doc said like that – “if you want, you may try peg-telaprevir-rib, but your case is hard to treat”. Liver function was stable and i decided did not undergo this therapy… Some clinical trials show substantional mortality at therapy with telaprevir and F4 and there was not clear for me – whether possible benefits of treatment with telaprevir outweigh its risks of harm or not. Unfortunately, one guy died on russian-spoken forum during telaprevir-based therapy, probably without cirrhosis. Dr.Koretz wrote in 2013, before the wide acceptance of interferon-free regimens:

Given the natural history of chronic hepatitis C, as well as what we know therapy accomplishes, it is very difficult to justify a policy for routinely treating such patients to prevent decompensated liver disease. The surrogate outcomes were not valid in the one occasion when validation information was available. The treatment has not been proven to be efficacious with regard to preventing clinically important disease, it is expensive, and it causes substantial morbidity (including death). It is an inappropriate clinical decision to prescribe a toxic therapy (especially an expensive one) that has never been shown to provide clinical benefit in properly-done randomized trials.

(http://www.news-medical.net/health/Hepatitis-C-treatment-no-benefits-and-possible-harm.aspx)

Now planning to try treatment with indian generics.

Yes, i am planning 24 weeks. Some negative predictors may slightly lower SVR rate for me – for example, SVR rate for sof-led with IL28b TT is near 90%, instead of near 100% for IL28b CC, according to one report from EASL-2016.