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Personal Stories

People without treatment experience

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.

Anthony
Anthony learnt about hepatitis C in 2006, just before he started injecting drugs, because his girlfriend had acquired it.
Dana
Dana first learnt about hepatitis C in the early 2000s when she had a sexual health check after meeting a new partner.
Danny
During a period when Danny was partying and consuming drugs regularly, he started to feel unwell and received a hepatitis C diagnosis.
Evan
Evan was diagnosed with hepatitis C around the late 1990s.
Gretchen
After her late husband was diagnosed with hepatitis C-related in the early 1990s, Gretchen was diagnosed with the virus too.
Laura
Laura decided to get tested for hepatitis C in the middle of 2020, because she had shared injecting equipment with a previous partner who had the virus
Mikey
Mikey learned about hepatitis C when his friend was diagnosed with it around 2017
Peta
Peta hasn’t been diagnosed with hepatitis C and doesn’t think about it a lot
Rashida
In 1994, when she was still living in Egypt, Rashida was diagnosed with hepatitis C
Ricky
Ricky was diagnosed with hepatitis C a month before his interview in 2020
Rose
Rose was diagnosed with hepatitis C around 1999
Rusty
Rusty was diagnosed with non-A, non-B hepatitis many years ago
Sam
When Sam was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2018, he didn’t know much about the virus