It's hard to type with just one hand (joint replacement surgery on right thumb on 8/19/13) but I wanted to put up a couple of favorite photos from my recent visit to heaven, technically referred to as the region of the village of Nela, in northern Spain. Extremely beautiful, peaceful and healing. We were there visiting dear friends, who took really good care of us. I wish all of my friends here could have such a great way to speed the healing process.

Wow, it's been nine whole months since I finished tx! I am still improving, very slowly, but at least I'm still making progress. My improvements have been enough that I've had the energy to tackle some long-standing problems too. After more than two years of steadily increasing pain and loss of function due to osteoarthritis in the base of both of my thumbs, I finally had a consultation with a hand surgeon, and I am actually excited that I'm now scheduled for surgery in the right hand (the most painful) in mid-August, and the surgery will let me regain normal functions and will eliminate virtually all of the pain from this joint. Hooray! He said I should be able to regain all the abilities to work with my hands I've lost over that last two years. By November my right hand should be recovered well enough to take over so I can go ahead and fix my left hand too before the end of the year.

I've also been catching up on all those pesky periodic medical screening tests, and I've also begun once again to make some inroads into the backlog of home cleanup and repair projects, and begun to reach out again to some friends who I've neglected a bit over the last two years. Life is beginning to approach some degree of normality again!

I'm almost 16 weeks post-EOT now, and my hair is finally starting to fill in a little bit. Whew! My energy is not great, but it was really low before I even started tx, and it's back to about that level now. I'm really hoping that SVR will bring more energy in spite of the cirrhosis and auto-immune problems, but have to wait and see.

I was too impatient to wait for my 12 week PCR, so I requested an additional one when I needed other blood tests at 8 weeks. The PCR normally comes back within 3 days at Stanford, so when I didn't get it by the 5th day I was convinced I had relapsed and my doctor wanted to tell me in person, but yesterday (9 days after the test, and also my birthday) I got good news - it was still UND! Wow, what a relief! The CBC was also good, with my counts all at least 3/4 of the way back to normal. Now it I could just have my energy and my hair back again I would be really happy!