I have a friend who has been diagnosed with Hepatitis C. She is having a lot of pain in the area of her liver as well as having "lumps" on the back of her neck. She has been waiting for three weeks for the viral load panel (?) to come back before they discuss treatments. what type of treatment is available and do these symptoms sounds like the disease has progressed?
To clear up what a viral load is, it's the amount of virus found in one milliliter of blood. But viral loads vary from one person to the next so they're not always a good indicator of the severity of the disease but this will give your friend's doctor a baseline number to work with. This is something that will be rechecked during her treatment and the results will be compared to previous tests to see if the viral load goes down. This tells the doctor (and your friend) the current treatment, whatever it turns out to be, is working… or not.
If viral loads warrant, her doctor will likely start her on a combination of two drugs. This is called combination therapy ans this approach has shown better results than using one drug alone (monotherapy). There are a number of antiviral drugs used but I have no way to know if your friend needs them and, if she does, which ones her doctor will prescribe. You can run a search for this if you really need to know.
I'm guessing your friend's hepatitis C is acute rather than chronic. her symptoms sound like the early phase of acute hepatitis but only a small number of people have symptoms during the early phase. Symptoms when present generally appear 5-12 weeks after exposure. 80% don't have symptoms and sometimes symptoms don't show up for 10, 15 or even 20 years later and by the time they do, serious damage may already have been done to the liver.
"do these symptoms sounds like the disease has progressed?" — I can't tell you what you want to know. I'd need to see multiple diagnostic test results.
My answer is about the viral particle, as the term Hepatitis refers to the disease itself and you are not. The Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a small (55-65 nm) in size, enveloped, positive single strand RNA virus in the family flavivinande. Although Hepatitis a,B,and C all have similar names, they do all cause different Hepatitis and liver inflammation disease. they are all both distinctly different genetically and clinically.
Unlike both types a and B, type C doesn't have a life saving vaccination either. not until 2007 was a potential World Wide Distribution of a preventative vaccine with the only animal HCV study involved being the Chimpanzee. hopefully sometime soon a vaccine for humans will be found and approved that works too. good luck and God Bless.