I apologize already: this will be a boring post. I just want to put down a little history, mostly to help me keep things straight in my mind.

This story starts in 1975, less than a year after I met my husband. In that year, he was in a motor vehicle accident and suffered a number of serious internal injuries. Repairing the damage required that he receive 14 units of blood and as it turns out, one of those units was contaminated with a slow, secretive, but deadly disease.

For 15 years, nothing happened -- nothing medically, at least. Of course, lots of things happened! Our relationship deepened, we realized we were irrevocably in love, we married, had children (not entirely in that order ;-) moved around the country, changed jobs. But in the early 90's, he started to notice some strange symptoms, arthritis-like stiffness, growing fatigue, joint pain. He went for tests -- lots of tests -- but no-one could figure out what the problem was. After a few months, the symptoms went away and we all chalked it up to some little physiological hiccup.

A couple of years later, the symptoms returned, again for a few months. Once again, tests revealed nothing. Possibly it was some early-onset arthritis. Perhaps it was due to overwork. We moved closer to his workplace to cut down on commuting, and the symptoms subsided.

A few years later, a special blood test revealed that he had active HepC. It was a terrible shock. If you are part of this grieving experience, perhaps you already know how this kind of news feels so I won't bore you with the details. The doctor informed us that people with active HepC virus generally have 5 to 10 years to live ... but we did not know for sure how long the virus had already been active.

There was nothing else to do at the time but move forward, live our lives, raise our children, work, move, do what all young families do. In 1999 the symptoms hit again -- badly. This time, the 'interferon' treatment was available in testing phase and a treatment pilot was available for those willing to participate. We participated; it was unsuccessful. The symptoms abated for a while again...

In 2004 he mentioned that he was feeling different. There was nothing he could put his finger on; he was just 'feeling lousy'. More tests revealed that the disease was actively on the attack: by this time he had cirrhosis of the liver. Now our lives changed significantly and we were all aware that we were living with a family member with a chronic disease. Things got worse, subtle changes, more symptoms appeared weekly. Desperate, we tried the interferon again which by this time was out of beta testing and had become a mainstream treatment for HepC.

He stayed on the interferon for most of 2005. It is a gruesome treatment. Again, I won't bore you with the details. Once again, we put up with it because we held hope that he could be cured and we could return to a normal life. But in late 2005 he started to have increasingly severe autoimmune responses to the drugs and 2 weeks before the end of the 48-week treatment, he had to quit because his entire immune system appeared to be shutting down.

He was hospitalized the first time late in November. I will blog more about the hospital experience later in this blog because that's the part I'm having such a struggle recovering from. At this point I can summarize that he was in and out of hospital (mostly in) for the next 5 months and for the last 7 weeks, he did not get out at all. And he died in April of 2006.