Waking to a New Life Maureen Cook went from worrying about how long she had to live to planning for a whole new life. It only took her 23 years. “I found out I had hepatitis C in 2000 when a diligent and insightful GP decided to test me for it after she discovered I had hepatitis B back in 1975. I’d cleared the hep B then and didn’t think about it anymore. Didn’t know I had hep C,” she recalled. “Well, when I got my hep C diagnosis, I started worrying about how long I would live for, and worried about passing the virus to other people. I’d look at pictures of the virus and thought it looked really scary.” Because there was no effective cure back then, Maureen looked into, and tried complementary therapies. “I tried acupuncture, herbal remedies… with no results,” she recounted. Then, in 2009 because she had liver cirrhosis, Maureen was put on interferon treatment.
documents my struggle to be present in the world as my consciousness dragged itself to the surface ... I had to relearn thinking, comprehending, remembering, doing and to be able to stand up and walk again. “I was attending an art group in Stepney, learning painting. The artwork was my way of processing all that,” she explained. “The series of five portraits was me coming back to life. It was almost like a spiritual experience.” In 2015 she had a call from the Flinders Medical Centre offering her to be part of a trial of new direct acting antiviral drugs. “The new treatment was different. The only side effect I had was insomnia. My asthma
“That went horribly wrong—I almost died,” she said. She kept a visual diary during the first treatment but had to stop because she became too ill. She had ended up in intensive care for nine days with double pneumonia and septicemia. “My bone marrow had stopped producing the vital blood cells to fight the good fight for me. Remarkably I survived, after I was not expected to,” she said. “I had to go to St Margaret’s hospital to learn to walk again. My memory and comprehension was really bad.” In 2011, she began a series of five selfportraits documenting her difficult journey to recovery. She named the series Waking the Dead. In her artist statement for an exhibition where her art was presented. Of this series, she said: ‘Waking the Dead 1-5’
The last painting – Relief – in Maureen’s triptych depicting the terror, despair and relief of her interferon treatment experience.
HEPATITIS SA COMMUNITY NEWS 100
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