Lost along the way

I don't wanna sound morbid, but I keep thinking back to the days when I first joined the PZ hepperboard, I think it was 2002,  at a time when many of us were rather pessimistically inclined towards the future. Further back, in 1994, concurrent with my diagnosis, Norwegian newspapers and other media did their very best to issue our death sentence and tried to scare us shitless. Many of us started taking treatment which at the time was cruel, and some of us opted to stay out of it, hoping for the best.

Now, 15 years later, new medicines have arrived and treatment is a piece of cake, and I am probably too old (68) to qualify for it, at least my GP told me so. Soon generic tools will be available at an affordable price , and I'll probably take that cure if I live that long.

It is evident that the varieties of the virus and the varieties in life style among us have had a profound impact on how our lives have been affected by the critters. What strikes me as the most important lesson to be extracted from the pool of hep c experience is that it wasn't as heavy as they said it would be. I suspected that from the beginning.

So we lost some good people along the way. But, given the same average age in the non-hep c population (control group) as the folks at the hepperboard, did we lose more ? In quality, the answer is surely yes, but how about quantity ? As I predicted in the early 2000s, more of us would end up 6 feet under because of other reasons than a failing liver or pancreas.

Long live the dead hep c zoners.