“It was like being left at a stop for a bus that’s not coming” is how Patrick describes learning at a day’s notice that the treatment he was promised for his hepatitis C would not be going ahead.
“I’d been referred to and accepted for the scheme to treat hepatitis in the community with the new drugs that are available. They took my bloods and told me it would start on a Friday morning but, on the Thursday, I got a call to say the
Government had pulled the plug on treatment.”
“It was a shock to the system,” he says. “There I was, mentally prepared, and I’d prepared my family too, and I was thankful I’d been given the opportunity to get rid of this disease. It was very demoralising.”
So demoralising, in fact, that he relapsed. “Just a bit. I didn’t go mad, using, but when you get bad news you think ‘what’s the point’.
Source: Paul Cullen, The Irish Times, 02/08/17
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