In the past few days I have again felt compelled to discuss hepatitis C with a relative stranger. The reaction, I have found is generally the same. They listen, appear to digest and then skip over it. They never ask questions.

In this mood I am posting up this piece again in explanation.

(I understand that the treatment situation  has advanced in leaps and bounds since I wrote this piece in 2006, and that rapid recovery is, anecdotally, the norm.)

Hecate’s Trip To The Liver Clinic – A Psychogeography in Plague Territory 

The appointment was for 3.45. At 4.15 I will still be sitting in the waiting-corridor, waiting.

I’d long ago given up reading my book, a surprisingly engaging socio-history on the Iberian Peninsular post-Franco, when I raised my head to look briefly around.

I was glad Dick wasn’t with me. He’d be all stiff-upper-lip, or stick-uppa-arse as I frequently pronounced it to his face. He’d be freezing me out with his theatrically dignified grin-&-bear-it demeanour.

One empty seat separates me from a low coffee table of magazines and a twittery woman in the next chair. Our backs are against the wall. She’s picking through the magazines and chattering non-stop. She’s wearing a screw’s uniform. She’s chattering away non-stop to a male screw, who is hand-cuffed to a blue-clad man sat between them. The screws are slagging off an absent work mate for being obese. The prisoner between them is silent, he’s thinking he might die of this awful disease, alone, in prison. It is after all ‘an incurable disease’ that we are waiting here for.

This incurable disease we’re all here consulting about today was discovered and named in 1989…read more…