Thought after reading so many inspiring stories of other’s journeys here, I would kick off with my own. I haven’t shared much detail about my background before, so sorry for the essay in advance lol

After a fairly excruciating wait of a month since receiving my meds, an auspiscious New Year’s day start! Really wanted to get onto the Redemption-2 trial – I can never repay the generosity of those here and the Buyer’s Club who made this possible, but hopefully throwing in my contribution to help Dr James might go some small way towards it

A bit of preliminary info on my pre-tx condition. GT1a, 27 years infected, diagnosed 1990 (which would have been the year it was isolated from merely ‘non-A/non-B’ status) Years I forgot about it/repressed to a certain extent, and had a fairly fatalistic POV. Kind of like the bullet that’s out there with your name on it – or not!

During those decades somehow I managed to keep to a F0 score (no idea how heh) but in recent years I’ve come to suspect that a lot of symptoms might not be caused by other conditions as I’d thought. The sometimes crushing fatigue (hey my 92-yr old mother has more energy a lot of the time lol), joint/muscle pain which might not be completely chronic pain after all, weird abdominal issues with no apparent cause, those irritating & unnerving stinging/congested liver sensations, the grasping for words you’re sure you knew once…all those familar symptoms.

Last pre-tx stats:

Ended up with a relatively small VL – 262,000 (no idea what it was until a month ago, so that was a surprise)
ALT – 40 (used to be in the high 50s-60s until I started milk thistle a few years back)
AST – 26
GGT – 13
Bilirubin – 5
Platelets – 411

Prescribed Mesochem sof/dac 12 weeks by Dr J, and its all go from here. Not expecting any issues, although I’m open to the possibility of extra sx purely due to my lower than average weight of 52kg, giving a higher gram per kg effect particularly with the dac, as the doc informed me could be the case. Planning to try and stick it out without any dosage decrease, maybe the bit extra will give a kind of added “insurance”!

So, I’m locked, loaded and ready as I’ll ever be for the battle. I reckon the odds are very definitely on my side