Final Tests - Last Post

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I go for my six month bloods check-up next Tuesday. It will be interesting to see how my thyroid has recovered and whether I will need to go on thyroxin to balance it.
There will be some minor interest in my liver function tests. Unless there is something dramatic going on nothing will be done at this stage.
In eighteen months I will go for another liver biopsy to see how things are progressing there. Again, unless there is major change for the worse no action will be taken.

So I feel that this blog is ready to be closed. It has pretty much come to the end of its life as a hepc blog and as a diary of combination therapy treatment.
It’s been a fascinating journey for me and I have learned so much.
To be really honest I was not happy with my life before I started treatment. This unhappiness was in fact one of the greatest motivators for doing the 48 week course. I knew it would be a life changing experience in itself and at the end the hope of a healthy new life.
Although the end was not what I had hoped for in that the treatment failed, yet in many other ways the journey through a year of combination therapy has exceeded all my expectations.
Just having a year out at the age of 50 was an amazing opportunity to reflect and examine my life. In Judaism, after every 49 years there was a jubilee year when all lands returned to their original owners and all slaves were set free.
Everyone had a year off to celebrate their freedom.
Even the land was left untilled to have a rest.
Although I certainly haven’t been resting I have been coming into new areas of freedom and change in my own life.

One of the main areas has been in the emotional arena. My panic reactions and my tendency to still lapse into times of bitterness and resentment have been of some concern to me.
Just before treatment I read a great life changing book.
It is called, “Total Forgiveness” by Dr. R. T. Kendall.
In the book Dr. Kendall calls forgiveness the greatest challenge to all of us and compares it to climbing Mount Everest. In the area of counselling and even in burnout these emotions can drain whatever energies are still left and are looked upon as excellent examples of the soul affecting the body in a negative way.
I worked through a lot of the stuff outlined in the book before treatment and was very pleased I did. The experience of TX really tested everything that I had learned in that particular classroom.
Nothing is real unless it stands the test of the crucible of real life.
In the past I have taken up many teachings from many sources and dropped them when they haven’t stood the test of the real world.
What’s the point of believing some wonderful sounding sentiments if in the end it doesn’t work and it is just so much high sounding philosophy?

I remember my Dad dropping Greek philosophers out of his life. He was very fond of quoting Demosthenes and the like and thought they were great. Then he discovered that all the Greek philosophers were homosexual and many of them had a young boy or series of boys.
Ancient paedophiles, in fact.
Kinda changes your perspective on all their high sounding stuff, don’t it?

For me discovering the ability to forgive has set me free from carrying around old burdens of self pity, bitterness and resentment. These old enemies – well, no, old friends really, came back to plague me many times during my lowest points during treatment.
My blogging career is not over. I am setting up a new one which will be loosely based on the book I am writing and will form a sort of pre advertisement of what the final work will be about. Keeping a blog on my progress is also a means of getting feedback from some friends I have made at the Dunamis conferences. I will feed this back into the book in order to make it as relevant as I can.
I have agreed to give a year to this project.

Thank you to all of you who have followed me during my roller coaster trip through combination therapy. I see from a counter that I had installed recently that I get 120 regular readers. One of the greatest surprises was receiving emails form “ordinary” people who didn’t have hepc but had happened on my blog and kept up with it.
I hope some of you will follow the new blog as well. More details will appear here when I set it up.
Thanks also to all of you who have made my treatment more difficult than it could have been. This includes friends and family. You have helped to test and refine my belief that total forgiveness is the only way forward to living free and maintaining a calm sprit amidst the storms of life.
Needless to say you are totally forgiven.

Thanks most of all to Almighty God, The Angel who has been with me throughout this hepc treatment journey and who will continue to be with me through the larger journey of life itself.
“For I know that my redeemer lives and that though this body of flesh be destroyed, yet in my spirit I shall see God”. Job 19:25