I am here to tell you a story, a story with a confused beginning and hopefully a happy ending. Before that I will simply ask you:
- How would your life change, if one beautiful winter day, you learned you had some never-heard-of disease?
- How fast can you Google ‘hepatitis B’?
- How fast would your heart start to beat?
- How quickly would you understand that you are not prepared at all?
- And how would it change your life if you discovered your mom had it too? Would you get depressed? Would she get depressed knowing that maybe she transmitted it to you over 28 years ago? “What a family,” some will think. “Full of viruses.”
I hope you began to understand what hepatitis really is – a pandemic.
My name is Silvana and I am fighting ‘B’ from 16 December 2006, with evasive success. I have changed my attitude a lot these years – from panicked thoughts, such as: “Can I accidentally infect someone?” and “THIS thing is actually in my blood, inside me” to “With proper treatment I will be fine” and “I will be healthy someday.”
For many people treatment with pegylated interferon is effective, but unfortunately in my case was a failure. Two years later I am still trying to understand this perfect killing machine – hepatitis B – it’s a quiet, almost invisible disease, with the power to destroy your life, so test yourself!
Currently I am under second treatment with nucleotide analog reverse transcriptase polymerase inhibitor (NRTI); soon I will make the first PCR (a test which shows the hepatitis B levels in your blood – less is better :) and I keep my fingers crossed for a great result – keep yours too.
Thank you for being here.