“Keep your blood clean, your body lean and your mind sharp”
Henry Rollins

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Up until now the greatest fear for me (apart from centipedes and millipedes) has been infecting someone else with what I’ve thought of as my tainted blood. I’ve spent years dealing with my own wounds, managing my own cuts and abrasions, taking band-aids out of people’s hands and insisting on doing things myself.

It’s affected going to the doctor, going to the dentist, going to pathology ... it’s even affected manicures and pedicures (how shallow of me).

I felt like Typhoid Mary in full sail, chock to the brim with infection and just looking for a comfortable place to berth.

It’s fascinating how that has changed with an undetected viral load result.

I’ve gone from worrying about infecting other people to wondering if they could infect me. I had hep C and you would never know it to look at me. How do I know other people don’t?

So some of the things I thought would be different: not worrying about giving someone else hep C, not having to panic if someone wanted to clean a wound or put a band-aid on me - well they aren’t different at all! I’ve just shifted my focus from me having hep C to possibly other people having it and not knowing!

I realise this is an irrational fear, and it only swims to the surface when I give it room to do so, but still - it’s an interesting change of perspective.