Congratulations on your EOT…….can’t wait for all your positive results!!

I am more concerned about what happens to all the remotes…..

When you pick up the remote controller it sprays out remotes, but it only takes 1 remote to turn on the A/C or the TV, so what happens to all the rest?

What if they were just hanging around, plotting?

Sometimes I wake up in a sweat worrying that all these lost remotes will develop a collective consciousness and take over the world, after all, they already know how to control almost everything!

But more seriously if you look at the blood levels as you start taking medication it looks like this:

So the levels increase rapidly to start with then reach a steady state where each day almost all you take in is excreted.

The almost is because you never quite reach steady state but it goes up like 1/2, then and extra 1/4, then an extra 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and if you add all those up you never ever quite get to 1.

Fantastic news Ariel….so so happy for you……….

At some point along the road to cure we are giving the medication, but there is no virus.

This medication simply hangs around in the tissues and is excreted out of your body every minute of every day. After about 5 days on treatment your body is excreting almost exactly a full dose of medication each day. You are taking more medication to top up this loss, but the level remains relatively constant (it actually looks like a saw tooth pattern with the highest level about 1-2 hours post taking your dose, and the lowest just before you take a new dose.

The reason that we need a period of over treatment is that UND does not mean “there is no virus”. It means there is not enough virus to see and this could represent 0 (as in cured) or something in the range 0.1 – 10 depending on the sensitivity of the test.

During the post treatment period if there is remaining virus the drugs wash out of your body, and the virus regrows. If there is no virus left (ie truly undetected because it is not there) you have SVR.

I’m not actually sure what liver discomfort feels like but I have a “burning” sensation on and off above and around my tummy and under (but I have had this for a long time so maybe that’s what it is)…..other than that feeling pretty good