Hi @Gita_Madhu,
One thing I do is spread my tasks out over time. This prevents one from overworking their bodies. Getting enough sleep is also beneficial and helpful. Reduce stress and eat a healthy diet. Make sure to stay hydrated. These are some of the things I do, and I find them helpful. Best, Bansah1
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Hello, dear @froggy23. Thank you for opening your heart so bravely. Firstly, remember that it’s not necessary to discuss this situation with everyone; unfortunately, not everyone is prepared or has adequate information about HBV. There’s no need to feel distressed or overwhelmed by having this infection.
I’m very sorry about your dad, but I’m incredibly glad you have such an empathetic and informed partner; that support is worth its weight in gold.
Currently, there are excellent drugs and advancements that allow our bodies to be in wonderful condition. You, more than anyone, as a future health specialist, know that treatments are very effective in maintaining a full, long, and high-performing life. In my personal experience, by maintaining a healthy lifestyle and exercising, I’ve managed to keep my viral load to a minimum and my liver in perfect condition; the virus doesn’t define what we can achieve, a virus cannot thwart our goals.
In this community, there are people who have lived with HBV for 40 or 50 years; they are already grandparents and enjoy their families. There’s no need to despair. If we already have this in our body, let’s see it as a signal to do things better, take care of our health, and make the most of our time. You have a brilliant future as a doctor, and your empathy will be your best tool with patients! You will be a key player in educating and breaking this stigma from within, let’s move forward with our heads held high!
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Hello everyone, my name is Adebola and I’m from Nigeria. I’m really happy to have found this community because for the first time in a long while, I feel like I’m in a space where people understand each other and are not ashamed of their Hepatitis B status.
I got to know about my Hepatitis B status about 5 years ago, and honestly it has been a difficult journey emotionally and mentally. There have been times I felt invisible and discouraged because despite working very hard academically and graduating with a good result, I still felt denied from certain opportunities globally because of my condition.
Sometimes it made me question myself and feel heartbroken, especially when opportunities I truly wanted seemed to slip away after medical screenings or health requirements. But seeing people here openly sharing their stories, supporting one another, and living boldly is giving me hope and making me feel less alone.
I’m grateful to be here, and I hope to learn from everyone, connect with others, and continue growing stronger mentally and emotionally.
Thank you all for creating such a safe and supportive community.
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I discovered my status years ago, and since then it has been a journey filled with fear, stigma, loneliness, and uncertainty about my future. I graduated with good grades and worked hard academically, believing effort and determination would help me achieve my dreams. But many times, after successfully passing job applications and interviews, I get stopped at the medical stage, and opportunities I prayed for suddenly feel out of reach.
Recently, I also began realizing that the fear of discrimination does not only affect employment, but can also affect educational and international opportunities. That realization broke me emotionally because for years I kept hoping hard work alone would be enough.
Sometimes it becomes difficult not to question yourself or feel left behind when you see others moving forward while you carry a condition many people do not understand. I kept my status private for a long time because of shame and fear of being judged, and that silence became very painful.
But seeing communities like this reminds me that we are human beings first before any diagnosis. We deserve empathy, opportunities, support, and hope just like everyone else.
I sincerely hope future generations grow up in a world with better awareness, more compassion, universal vaccination, and less stigma, so fewer people have to silently carry this emotional burden alone.
Thank you all for sharing your stories openly. It helps people like me feel less invisible.
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Hi @Adebola,
Welcome to the community. I am glad you’ve found the platform. You are correct that this is a community for all hepatitis B patients to share, bond, and support each other.
I empathize, and I apologize for all the discrimination you have faced. It is unfair and wrong. While this experience is not great, please don’t give up. Find ways to remain positive, and let’s keep pushing forward. One step and day at a time. We shall overcome. You are not alone; we are stronger together. Keep fighting and remain hopeful. Best, bansah1
Thank you very much, friend I’m grateful for the encouragement and making me feel visible. I almost wanted give up I thought that was end of it, thought hepatitis will be the determinate of my future. I almost wanted committing suicidal until I came across this platform. Thanks to Claude ai that help me with this platform. This restore my confidence once again and I hope I overcome it.
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You are very welcome. I am glad you found the community. We are all in this battle together. Things might be looking tough right now, but we can’t give up. We must remember to live in our own ways. Feel free to reach out or let us know how we can support you. Bansah1
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Hi am new here diagnosed with hapitatis B taking pep drugs currently and having gastric ulcer pls help me am depressed
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Hello @Chisom and welcome.
I’m sorry you are going through this. Depression is not nice.
I suffer from it too.
Are you seeing a doctor?
How can we help you today?
No dear
Am not yet
Am broke right now to afford a doctor
The last time I went to the hospital they just cared about the money and never gave me a solution to my problem
My stomach pains me every day
Which affect my back
Now I took pep it doubles I can’t sleep
The pains wake me up from sleep
I can feel my liver hurt
But the last time I did test my liver functions were good though i was still having pains now I took pep it doubles so bad
Can’t sleep just depressed
And am 22 just starting life
I have no job or work
Am just sad and depressed
Oh, I’m so sorry. You have a lot going on. And so young.
Where do you live? What is pep?
Nigeria
Pep a drug to prevent HIV after exposure
Hello @Adebola
Please don’t give up. Life is hard. We must overcome our barriers to get
to a better place. Easier said than done, I know. Especially when the
pain is so intense. But know this, the pain will go, it won’t last
forever.
Go outside and look at nature, breath it in. Look how well nature
functions. Exercise is good for depression. Simple stuff like walking 20
minutes. Or be like @ThomasTu lifting double his weight. Lol not for me.
We are all in the same boat and here for you.
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Ok. @Chisom I’m not an expert in that field… Let’s see if we can get more
information for you and some help in Nigeria.
Where did you get the pep? if hospital won’t see you.
Hi @Chisom,
Sorry to hear about all you’re going through. There is a thread here where you might be able to get more local support: Hepatitis B in Nigeria: discussion thread
TT
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Hi, thank you so much to those who set up this forum and all the experts who have been contributing their knowledge and support here. It’s been very reassuring and I’m very grateful for all the generous info being provided here 
I recently tested positive to HepB during a routine health screening I did.
It came as a complete surprise/shock, as according to my records I was vaccinated at birth, with a total of 4 shots by the time I was 1 year old, in accordance with my country’s (Singapore) national immunization program. However, I’ve long known that my mom is a carrier, and she is currently actively managing the condition with meds and is healthy. My grandma passed away 3 years ago from liver failure which I witnessed first hand (and have very vivid memories of), although she also managed with meds for many years before her passing (but I think she started too late and some liver damage was already done before she went on treatment). So, in that sense, my test results came as a complete surprise but not a complete and utter surprise.
I think why it was so surprising is because, even though I’ve witnessed my grandma and mother suffering first hand from the disease, I had kind of protected myself mentally with the typical “but it won’t happen to me” thoughts and assumed I was totally safe with the vaccination. Maybe that was what made witnessing my grandma’s passing (she was exhibiting full-on symptoms of end-stage liver failure: severe jaundicing, edema…) not as traumatic as it could have been, as I was under the illusion that it would be impossible for this to happen to me. I’m also aware that, despite knowing this family history and knowing my mom is actively managing the disease and being concerned for her, a part of me subconsciously avoided seeking out more information and understanding to avoid creating more stress, worry and fear in myself (as I am very emotionally sensitive in general and to these things – even someone talking about a fracture, or some XYZ physical condition, can be enough to make me physically wince and want to walk away from the conversation, as I can literally feel the physical and emotional pain imagining what that would feel like in myself).
I’m still kind of baffled how I ended up infected if I was vaccinated, but everything points to the highest likely cause of infection being transmission from mom when I was born. Now this is the part which makes me kind of angry at the lack of education or counseling given by medical professionals here given how endemic this disease is in this part of the world. In retrospect, I’m quite unimpressed by how the doctor talked through the results with me during my health screening; maybe he was just an average GP doing his job but it was very matter-of-fact and just about how I would have to do a follow-up test in 6 months to determine if my condition is chronic, not much reassurance or counseling about transmission risk (I’m obviously the most concerned about sexual intimacy with my partner, but the combination of being shocked and caught off guard by the results and being raised in a culture where sex is generally not openly discussed, meant I could not even think of the most important questions I wanted to ask during this consult – thankfully, this forum has answered a lot of them). I’m also surprised that my mother’s specialist never counseled her about ensuring that her children were all properly tested for HepB, especially when her symptoms flared up – this recent health screening I did was only the second health screening I did as an adult, and it turns out my previous one, near a decade ago now, didn’t even contain a HepB panel (!!!), which was another unpleasant surprise. So I can’t really know when I ever became positive. My brother said his last results showed that he was negative though 
One of the first things I did after getting my results was to contact my current and past sexual partners (thankfully very few and all relatively recent) to tell them to get tested and vaccinated. One got tested very quickly and came back negative with weak immunity. Another reminded me that we hadn’t even end up having penetrative sex and said he was already vaccinated. My current partner who is now long-distance got his results a week or so ago, and was both negative for the antigens and antibodies, so no infection but no immunity. It was a huge relief as we had a lot of unprotected sex when we were physically together for a month, and I was holding the worry of either 1) potentially infecting him with it if I had already been carrying it or 2) having been actually infected by him. He’s not from Asia though, so it’s probably much less common in his part of the world.
Also, I’ve never had a blood transfusion, or donated blood, or did anything else that could have been put me into direct contact with infected fluids from people outside my family, that I know of. My sexual history is very sparse and clean, with my current partner being only the second person I’ve had penetrative sex with in my life.
Either way, all of this just points to the still unpleasant but quite likely scenario that I have been a chronic, asymptomatic carrier for quite awhile now without realizing, most likely having caught it from mom somehow despite having been vaccinated. Either I am one of those unlucky few for whom the vaccination somehow doesn’t work, or I managed to get it from mom somehow when I was older and the immunity had worn off (through her body fluids somehow contacting a cut or wound when her viral loads were high – not entirely implausible to imagine, I guess). I guess I will never know, and it doesn’t really matter in terms of managing this disease, but I’m just quite frustrated that this wasn’t caught sooner. I feel like my mom’s doctors could have done a better job at educating her and us given how transmission from mother to child is so common. Or maybe I’m just overthinking it and trying to find something to pin my frustration on, I don’t know.
At the end of the day, I am healthy, mom is healthy, and I’m glad I know now so I can actively monitor it. My current partner was thankfully also understanding and is going to be getting his vaccination soon. I still have some open questions and and worries that I wished my doctor could have more proactively addressed, but I hope this community will be able to help with that since that unfortunately didn’t happen.
Once more, thanks to the experts and others here for all the info and support and sharing your stories
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A follow-up question for the site admins is, how do I actually post a new topic here? I wanted to post one with some questions I still have that I hope some of the experts could help answer but I don’t seem to see a button to do that anywhere and it’s leaving me rather confused. Thanks for the help!
Hi @axotylll, nice to meet you.
I tend to agree that you were likely infected at birth, given that you’ve never had a blood transfusion, and none of your current or past sexual partners have it. Sometimes breakthrough infections can happen, despite receiving the vaccine at birth. The most important determining factor in this is your mother’s viral load at the time you were born. If her viral load was high, and you did not also receive HBIG, there is actually a substantial risk of passing it on. Even with HBIG, there are still some breakthrough infections from mother-to-child transmission if viral load is high enough. Current guidelines suggest that people with HBV DNA above 200,000 take antiviral therapy during pregnancy to reduce viral load prior to the baby being born. Unfortunately, this option almost certainly did not exist when you were born.
Since viral load can fluctuate over time, it’s possible that your mother’s viral load was lower when your brother was born, compared to how it was when you were born… or it could just be a case of being lucky or unlucky. I’m sorry that your mom’s specialist never told her to get her children tested. Generally this should be done for babies born to HBV+ mothers between 9-12 months old, after they’ve completed the vaccination series. Unfortunately, there are a lot of doctors who don’t know very much about hep B, even in endemic countries. I do share your frustration in how your hep B wasn’t discovered sooner. I have also likely had it since birth, and I didn’t find out until I was 12.
I do want to commend you for reaching out to your current and past sexual partners. It’s not an easy discussion to have, but it shows that you care a lot about protecting the people around you. Disclosure is something that I personally struggled with for years. Hopefully your current partner is open to starting the vaccine series as soon as possible.
Please do take care of yourself. If you are young, you have a very good chance of living a long, healthy life. It’s very scary and distressing to see your grandma going through liver failure, but in her case, she was likely much older by the time there were any medicines available to treat hep B at all. You have the advantage of being able to start treatment before you have substantial liver scarring. The most important advice I have for you is to stay on top of your monitoring. I get blood tests every 6 months, though I get them done more frequently than that if I’m going through a flare.
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Hi @axotylll ,
This forum operates on the Discourse platform. We use trust levels for our users. Every new user starts out at Trust Level 0. To post a new topic, you need to reach level 1. It’s quite easy to get there!
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Hi @et5656 , thank you so much for your response and reassurance I guess I just have to accept that I was unlucky enough to be infected somehow, but I also know that compared to my mom’s and grandma’s generation, I’m much luckier and armed with much more knowledge and resources than they were. Based on some convos with my mom about her disease history, it seems like she never knew about HepB until she was pregnant (and also not sure which child she meant by that, as I’m the youngest) and it didn’t sound like her doctors ever gave her much advice on how to manage it…it didn’t even sound like she started regular screening from then, after pregnancy, but only later, I’m not exactly sure when. I suspect that she also must have had an avoidant part of her that also preferred not to know/not to seek information out of fear, and that might have been one of her coping mechanisms having to watch her mother suffer from the disease for so many years, too. Just another reminder that a huge, huge part of managing a physical disease is the emotional and psychological component, too (sometimes even more than the physical part, actually!), which unfortunately I don’t think most societies do well at managing, even now 
I’m very grateful that this forum exists and it really helps with coping with the complicated emotions. I’m only just realizing how much a part of me is really quite shaken by this, but I had kind of repressed that with just thinking, “well anyway I am healthy now and it’s just good to know and there’s nothing to do about it anyway other than test again in 6months”. I’m only just realizing that I haven’t fully processed the emotions of the positive test which I already got 1.5months ago, and being able to just write things out here and read the experience of others and assurances of experts has been very helpful. I only discovered this community after a convo with my partner about him managing to schedule a vaccination appointment (his first shot will be today, yay!) spurred further questions and worries in my mind as he’s coming to visit soon for 2 months and I don’t want this to get in the way of our sexual intimacy or our long-term prospects.
But at least yes, thankfully there is slightly better awareness and there are better drugs and all now. My doctor said the standard recommendation is to go for liver and HepB tests every 6 months here, too. Unfortunately, being a freelancer I don’t have any company health insurance. Fortunately, the tests are subsidized at government clinics here, and overall I am financially comfortable enough. My mom had to be moved to a more expensive med after the virus mutated and became resistant to the standard (entacavir, I think), which I think must have also shaken her, although we don’t have a very emotionally mature culture in our family where we can openly talk about vulnerable emotions–and that really saddens me since I’m very empathic and can almost always sense when people are feeling something they are not even aware of or are even actively trying to deny, but having grown up in this family environment I am also at a loss of how to actively change that (case in point: writing about the real depth of my emotions and worries here instead of openly discussing them with mom).
And thankfully, yes, I am relatively young, live a healthy lifestyle, and live in a developed country with very good access to subsidized healthcare, so I guess I’m not too worried about physical sickness from HPB, at this point. It’s really more the financial, emotional and relationship toll that is frustrating. And just witnessing the suffering the past generations had to go through and the silent trauma of their own unspoken emotions, fears, frustrations…is just kind of heartbreaking, really.
Reading the posts in this community was a very strange experience emotionally, because despite my family history, I literally never knew there was actually so much stigma surrounding HPB 0_o I guess that was how ignorant I was about the disease, and maybe I also just got the impression from various convos with mom that it’s also quite common here? And what’s to be ashamed of having a disease that your mom passed to you that you had no control over anyway? But maybe ignorance was really bliss in this case because I didn’t actually fear being stigmatized when I updated my current/past partners…it was really just a natural sense of, this is the responsible (even if awkward) thing to do 
It’s a strange bag of feelings, really. There must be some optimum point on the graph where the amount of knowledge and literacy you have minimizes psychological distress but anything beyond that kind of just makes things worse. I know I’m a natural worrier so I have to be careful about how much I educate myself 
Anyway, I wish you all the best also in your journey managing this condition and hope you stay healthy and well Thank you again for sharing your own experience and the reassurances! <3
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