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Personal Stories

Women Aged 50+

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.

Brooke
Brooke was diagnosed with hepatitis C in the late 1990s. On receiving her diagnosis, she worried that she might die and that her children would have to grow up without her.
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.
Dana
Dana first learnt about hepatitis C in the early 2000s when she had a sexual health check after meeting a new partner.
Giovanna
Giovanna was diagnosed with hepatitis C in the mid-1990s. Experiences in a hepatitis C support group put her off interferon-based treatment
Gracie
In the early 1990s Gracie found out she had hepatitis C after her new partner asked her to get tested for it.
Gretchen
After her late husband was diagnosed with hepatitis C-related in the early 1990s, Gretchen was diagnosed with the virus too.
Heather
Heather was diagnosed with hepatitis C after her daughter was diagnosed with it through ‘a routine pregnancy screen’.
Rashida
In 1994, when she was still living in Egypt, Rashida was diagnosed with hepatitis C
Regina
Regina was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2009 after a blood test for a hysterectomy showed she had the virus
Sana
Sana was first diagnosed with a ‘blood infection’ in India in about 2008, before being diagnosed with hepatitis C in Australia in 2019