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Personal Stories

Experiences of the new treatment only

Here you’ll find participants’ accounts of hepatitis C diagnosis, living with hepatitis C, treatment and cure. The people and stories were carefully selected to highlight diversity in backgrounds and experiences. While this website is not able to tell every possible story of hepatitis C and treatment in Australia, it can show just how different people and their experiences are. In the stories can be found details of the many important concerns and circumstances our participants negotiated in living with and having treatment for hepatitis C.

The stories presented here rely on participant reports of overdose. Some experiences may not conform to medical definitions of overdose, and some responses described may not reflect medical advice.

While these narratives were written from the interview transcripts and rely on participants’ own words, some aspects have been paraphrased to improve coherence and readability. In making these changes we have worked hard to remain faithful to the original meaning and intentions. Some experiences may also be presented in other sections of the website, using more detailed quotations.

Alexander
Alexander was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 1996 when he was in prison and says that while he wanted to be cured of it, over the years he was ‘never that concerned’.
Amelia
Amelia was diagnosed with hepatitis C while she was pregnant with her son, and postponed treatment until after she had given birth.
Carol
Carol runs a small business in a regional town in New South Wales. She was first diagnosed with hepatitis C in the early 2000s, but it cleared spontaneously, without treatment.
Chris
Chris was diagnosed with hepatitis C in the early 1990s. He was very conscious of the stigma surrounding the virus and chose not to tell many people about his diagnosis.
Dominic
Dominic found out he had hepatitis C through a check-up at a community drop-in centre around 2002, when he was 18.
Gracie
In the early 1990s Gracie found out she had hepatitis C after her new partner asked her to get tested for it.
Julia
Julia found out she had hepatitis C while pregnant with her first child.
Kylie
Kylie was diagnosed with hepatitis C in the late 1990s. She was advised not to have treatment at the time, and she lived with the disease until she had the new treatment in 2017.
Lou
Lou works and studies part-time
Mem
Mem was diagnosed with hepatitis C shortly after giving birth in 2006
Miguel
Miguel acquired hepatitis C during a period in which, as he puts it, he was a ‘party animal’
Paulie
Paulie was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2002
Regina
Regina was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2009 after a blood test for a hysterectomy showed she had the virus
Rod
Rod was first diagnosed with hepatitis C in the early 2000s
Sana
Sana was first diagnosed with a ‘blood infection’ in India in about 2008, before being diagnosed with hepatitis C in Australia in 2019
Sean
While Sean wasn’t diagnosed with hepatitis C until 2001, he says he thinks he acquired it as a teenager in the late 1990s
Steve
Steve was diagnosed with hepatitis C in about 2005
Terence
Terence was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2016 after leaving prison