Hepatitis C Treatment: The Big Sleep In The Rabbit Hole

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Going through treatment of Hepatitis C, I suspended reality. 

My world became a rabbit hole.  More like a depressed Bugs Bunny than Alice.

The first on-screen appearance of Bugs Bunny, ...
The first on-screen appearance of Bugs Bunny, from an unrestored version of the cartoon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Only my husband Spanky, the psychiatrist and the research nurse could check on me.  But frequently I pulled the hole in on myself and stayed there.  It was kinda weird.   I felt safe from others but not my crazy mind.  I couldn’t close the rabbit hole fast enough to keep out my mind.   Sometimes I felt like I was watching the world through a window but  I couldn’t remember what happened that day.

Memories of coming out of a bar when the sun is still bright, eewww.

Twice stolen from Edvard Munch

Twice stolen from Edvard Munch

malavula.blogspot.com

I used to wonder if other study patients felt the same as me.  I would watch in the waiting room.  But they weren’t giving up their secrets.  Each traveling with his own rabbit hole.

Rabbit Hole Urban Dictionary
Alice in…Metaphor for the conceptual path which is thought to lead to the true nature of reality. Infinitesimally deep and complex, venturing too far down is probably not that great of an idea.
An allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. To go “down the rabbithole” is to enter a period of chaos or confusion.
Or to take acid, Deb
…….
Then the study ended.  As drugs began to leach out of my body, I felt like I took a year-long nap.  Only I wasn’t asleep.  I was waking from a little tiny world.  Like a newly released guest of the penal system or someone from the space station, I heard about stuff while in my pseudo-sleep but hadn’t really grasped it.  Politics, friends, life skills, I had to catch up on it all. This is more difficult than you think, trying to get past all the celebrity crap. Who “gets” celebrity crap?  I don’t but somebody must or it wouldn’t be ubiquitous.
Sometimes I want to crawl back down the rabbit hole.  During those times, I hang out in our guest room, my home during treatment.  It’s comforting in a psychiatric kind of way.  It took months to feel free of that need,  about four half-lives*  When I can’t sleep I still go in there.  It is normal to lie awake all night in the rabbit hole.
 I’m thinking of painting the rabbit hole room lavender (I don’t like lavender) or getting a new bed (I like the existing bed).  Dismantle the tangible rabbit hole.
*A half-life, t1/2, is the time it takes to remove 1/2 of a drug from your system.  To approach 100% drug removal takes about six half-lives.

A biological half-life or elimination half-life is the time it takes for a substance (drug, radioactive nuclide, or other) to lose one-half of its pharmacologic, physiologic, or radiological activity. In a medical context, the half-life may also describe the time that it takes for the concentration in blood plasma of a substance to reach one-half of its steady-state value (the “plasma half-life”)
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