either my father was away working, playing bridge, or playing golf, or he was roaring at my mother and my three older sisters. He never drank alcohol, but he endured frequent migraine headaches. When a headache rolled in he would hunch over on a chair or couch. Then he would thunder around the house, hollering and smashing things. If I wasn’t in his sight when the rages flared, I would scramble into any hiding place I could find and clamp my hands over my ears. Once my father broke my mother’s hand, and she often wore bruises. He never hit me except for a lone spanking.
Sometimes he tried to play with me. After the peaceful day decorating the tree, I was thinking that maybe my father wasn’t really a bad man. After all, he had suffered from polio as a child. He couldn’t run around like me and had to spend his childhood in a hospital. And the morning after Christmas, when he tried out one of his presents, a new razor and set of blades, he proudly showed me the art of shaving. I watched in amazement as he stood before the mirror in the upstairs bathroom with his belly bulging over the top of his pajama bottoms. They covered his mangled left leg, which was sticklike from his childhood disease. While he was shaving, he cut his cheek, so he plastered it with a small bandage.
Later, when no one was looking, I tiptoed back up the stairs to the bathroom. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror because I barely reached the top of the sink, but I ran the razor across my preschool cheeks. I scraped at the skin a few times and traipsed into the living room to show my family my handiwork. Blood poured down my face and spotted my blouse.
“What did you do?” my father shouted. He stormed and screamed and bellowed at me. I began to whimper and then to bawl. “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,” he roared. I pressed my lips together, trembling. He grabbed my arm and wrenched me up the winding staircase to the bathroom.
Snatching me around the waist, he lifted me up and forced my head into the sink under the running tap. Water washed through my hair and trickled pink over my face. I sputtered and sniveled and whined. “Stop crying!” he shouted again. I locked my mouth and willed my tears to stop.
Decades later, I wondered whether the razor cuts might have given me hepatitis C. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States advises anyone with any kind of hepatitis not to share personal items that could carry their blood. These include razors. My father died in 2001, succumbing to heart disease, kidney failure, and cancer. I seldom talked with him about his illnesses, and I would never have thought to ask him whether his disease-riddled system was also harboring hep.
Often people infected with HCV (the hepatitis C virus) die from other causes, so there’s a possibility he may have been infected. Because his childhood bout with polio had affected his leg, he underwent frequent surgery that required blood transfusions. Those surgeries would have occurred in the late 1920s or early ’30s. Around that time transfusion blood was often collected from professional donors, who were told merely they should keep themselves in good physical condition, be careful about cleanliness, sleep in a well-ventilated room, and get daily exercise. They were never asked about hepatitis C. It wasn’t even identified as a virus until 1989.
The U.S. Army reports that doctors in the ’20s and ’30s noticed “epidemic jaundice.”1 If some of that had been hepatitis C, my father may have had hep C most of his life. It may never have resulted in symptoms, since hepatology researchers report that the earlier in life you contract the virus, the longer it will take to seriously affect your liver. Although there is only a slim chance that I could have contracted the virus from my father’s razor, it is possible. And if I had contracted it early in life, according to the research, that may be why I went for decades without symptoms.
CHAPTER 2
INTO THE FOG
THE SECOND TIME I visited Dr. Radev, the first thing I said to her was, “So I’ve got hemochromatosis?”
“No, it looks like something else,” she said. “You need another test.”
I was relieved that I might not to have to give blood frequently for the rest of my life, so I marched over to the lab without hesitation. I submitted another requisition to the medical assistant, lay on the cot, took a deep breath, clamped my eyes shut, and spread out my arm. The blood test was over in a literal pinch.
The idea that I might have “something else” sparked questions in my mind, but they fizzled away as I made plans for a vacation with Al in Mexico. Whatever the diagnosis was, it couldn’t be too bad. I had always been healthy.
A week later I got another call from my doctor, asking me to come into the office. I thought she probably wanted to tell me about a minor problem the test had found, or maybe she just wanted to say I was 100 percent healthy. The worst I expected to hear was that I had a vitamin deficiency or high cholesterol. Instead, Dr. Radev said, “You have antibodies to hepatitis C.”
“What?”
“Hepatitis C,” she said. “It’s a disease that affects the liver.”
I had heard about hepatitis C on the radio. I remembered listening to a documentary about a lawsuit over blood products that were infected with the virus, but other than that, I knew little about it.
“How could I have that?” I asked.
“You must have come into contact with it somehow. It’s transmitted through blood,” Dr. Radev said. Someone else’s blood that carried the virus must have mixed with mine, she explained. She said that hep C could linger in the body for decades without showing symptoms. The virus might eventually scar the liver to the point that it would stop functioning. The result would be liver cancer or the need for a liver transplant.
“What?”
“Don’t worry,” she said in her soothing Philippine-accented voice. “About 20 percent of people who contract hepatitis C come down only with the acute form of the virus. It goes away on its own. People who just get acute hepatitis C may turn yellow or feel run-down for a few days or weeks, but their bodies fight off the infection. After that they no longer have the disease. They continue to produce antibodies for the rest of their life.”
Dr. Radev asked if I had ever injected drugs. “No,” I said.
She asked if I’d ever had surgery. “No,” I said, “except for tonsils.” She seemed puzzled (perhaps because tonsillectomies seldom require blood transfusions). She said that in rare instances hepatitis C can be transmitted through sex. I recalled that Jessica’s father had once become jaundiced. Maybe Peter had contracted hepatitis C during his frequent flings and had passed the infection to me. “Jessica’s father may have had hepatitis,” I told Dr. Radev. “Maybe I got it from him.”
But I had never become jaundiced, and I was a lot healthier than he had been. He got little exercise and was careless about his diet. I did lots of yoga and never ate junk food. Even if I had contracted the disease from him, I was sure I was among the 20 percent able to shake it off.
ACCORDING TO JULY 2016 figures from the World Health Organization, hepatitis C infects up to 150 million people worldwide and causes an estimated 700,000 deaths each year.1 Between the United States and Canada, close to 3 million people are infected with hepatitis C. In 2015 Public Health England reported 214,000 cases in the UK, while Australia reported 230,500.
Despite these huge numbers, most people infected with hepatitis C don’t know they have it. Many of them don’t even remember they had any possible contact with the pathogen in their youth (the prime time to contract hep C) or suspect they might possibly carry the disease. I didn’t, not even when my doctor said
