***Diagnosis (Book Excerpt from Hepatitis C, Cured)

“Eight months.” Few spoken words had ever delivered more impact than those two simple ones did. Understandable, since it was my doctor who said them. She was only trying to answer an uncomplicated question; one that I was admittedly more than a little afraid to ask.

But I asked. And she answered. A bit too matter-of-factly, for my taste. I was going to be one of the unlucky ones, thank you very much.
But wait. Hold on a second. I had already been unlucky more than once, when I was infected with both hepatitis A and B in high school. True, I had survived those episodes, but what the heck for? So I could die of Hepatitis C twenty-two years later? Sorry. Twenty-two years and eight months later.

Not fair, why me, what cruel justice is this? How did God decide it was my turn again?

A thing or two will cross a man’s mind when he learns he’ll be on the wrong side of the grass in less than a year. Like most mortals, I had never really thought all that much about death. Thirty-nine is not so ripe an age that one should be expected to think about it, right?

Well, I was thinking about it now, for sure. And the Doc was droning on about treatment options and what not, but I wasn’t listening to her.
I was thinking about dying.

Before the Doc’s unceremonious announcement, I had already known that I had “Non-A, non B” hepatitis. I had known, too, that things were getting serious. The jaundice, the fatigue, loss of appetite and weight, even the way the veins looked in my hands. All clues to the progress the disease was making in its effort to take me apart.

Current estimates suggest that over 3,000,000 Americans currently have chronic hepatitis C. And the Center for Disease Control puts the number of people in the US that have ever been infected with “C” at 1.6% of the population.
Put another way, if 200 people make up the congregation of your church on any give
Sunday, which three of them have had hepatitis C?

Up to fifty thousand people die worldwide of hepatitis C every year, eight to ten thousand of them right here in the United States.

Kind of a sobering thought.

So now, with the Doc chattering away about liver transplants, clinical trials, interferon, and drug cocktails, I was thinking about dying.

In eight months...

This is an excerpt from Johnny Delirious' bestseller.