The door to my right was open onto the treatment room, where two men and a woman rested in puffy brown-leather chairs with IV lines hanging from metal frames above the chair backs. A hallway extended straight in front of me where a string of office doors lay open or shut. Two nurses scurried past into the narrow hall. Neither of them were Maria. I was anxious to see her. I was waiting for news.

Suddenly there she was. Suddenly she hugged me. “It’s undetectable,” she proclaimed, and we smiled at each other and laughed. That was just yesterday. My hep is gone Although the standard for a cure has been an absense of detectable hep RNA in the blood 24 weeks after treatment, the Federal Drug Administration in the U.S. recently began accepting a 12-week null count as proof of a cure. I’ve reached my 12 weeks! More to come.