laneyb

I just stopped my interferon after about 9 months. To answer your question about the hospital – I had a PICC line put in my upper arm and then had the first treatment in the infusion room at my cancer center. After that, a home health agency was set up to deliver my medicine and set up where I could do it at home. It really wasn't hard to do it, and the PICC line was fairly easy to maintain.

My treatment was paused twice during the high dose treatment because of liver enzymes going up and my neutrophil count crashing. But, my oncologist is pretty conservative and doesn't make up missed doses. So, after 4 weeks, I began the injections. The home health agency showed us how to do it, and we didn't have any problems. I did have to stop a couple of times to let my neutrophils come back up, but once I got "over the hump," things went pretty well. I worked every day and was fairly active on the weekends. By about the 6 month, I wasn't even having fever anymore.

I recently stopped after developing tinnitus, fatigue, and hypothyroidism. We figure I got most of the benefit of the treatment. At this point, I was just making myself sick. It's been a week off the interferon now, and I'm feeling pretty good. Things will continue to improve, I'm sure, but it's nice to be off. I didn't have problems with depression that some report. I did have some hair thinning, but it wasn't noticeable to others and may have been more related to my thyroid than the interferon. There is treatment for that called Nioxin that really helped.

Good luck with your treatment. I bet you'll do just fine!

Laneyb

I just stopped my interferon after about 9 months. To answer your question about the hospital – I had a PICC line put in my upper arm and then had the first treatment in the infusion room at my cancer center. After that, a home health agency was set up to deliver my medicine and set up where I could do it at home. It really wasn't hard to do it, and the PICC line was fairly easy to maintain.

My treatment was paused twice during the high dose treatment because of liver enzymes going up and my neutrophil count crashing. But, my oncologist is pretty conservative and doesn't make up missed doses. So, after 4 weeks, I began the injections. The home health agency showed us how to do it, and we didn't have any problems. I did have to stop a couple of times to let my neutrophils come back up, but once I got "over the hump," things went pretty well. I worked every day and was fairly active on the weekends. By about the 6 month, I wasn't even having fever anymore.

I recently stopped after developing tinnitus, fatigue, and hypothyroidism. We figure I got most of the benefit of the treatment. At this point, I was just making myself sick. It's been a week off the interferon now, and I'm feeling pretty good. Things will continue to improve, I'm sure, but it's nice to be off. I didn't have problems with depression that some report. I did have some hair thinning, but it wasn't noticeable to others and may have been more related to my thyroid than the interferon. There is treatment for that called Nioxin that really helped.

Good luck with your treatment. I bet you'll do just fine!

Laneyb