The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

about a recent New York Times article about VX-950, a hepatitis C drug in trials.
    We cared a lot about those trials. Jamie jokes about being a “broken toy” with his bad knee, his impressive scar from childhood surgery, and occasional back spasms, but his major broken part is his liver. He has hepatitis C.
    As chronic and potentially fatal conditions go, hepatitis C has somegood points. It’s not contagious except through direct blood contact. Jamie has no apparent symptoms and found out that he has hepatitis C only through a blood test. One day he’ll develop cirrhosis and his liver will stop functioning and he’ll be in very big trouble, but for now, he’s perfectly fine. Also, when it comes to health problems, misery loves company; if a lot of people share your ailment, drug companies work hard to find a cure. About 3 million people in the United States have hepatitis C, along with 170 million or so worldwide, so it’s an active area of research, and Jamie’s doctors estimate that new, effective treatments are likely to be approved within five to eight years. Hepatitis C has a very long course—of the people who develop cirrhosis, most don’t get it for twenty or thirty years.
    Thirty years sounds like a very long time, but Jamie picked up hepatitis C through a blood transfusion during a heart operation when he was eight years old, before screening for hepatitis C began. And now he’s thirty-eight.
    The one treatment now available, pegylated interferon plus ribavirin, didn’t work for Jamie, despite an unpleasant year of flulike symptoms, pills, and weekly shots. Now we just have to hope that Jamie manages to hang on to his liver until researchers find new treatments. In addition to cirrhosis leading to liver failure, itself not an attractive prospect, hepatitis C also makes liver cancer far more likely. Thank goodness for liver transplants—though a transplanted liver is no picnic and, scarily, not always possible to get. (Like the old joke about the restaurant: “The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small.”)
    So we were all very interested in the Times piece’s description of possible new treatments. My father-in-law, Bob, found the article encouraging, but every time he made a comment, I countered it.
    “According to the article, the research is very promising,” he said.
    “But both of Jamie’s liver doctors told us that it’s going to be at least five years, if not more, for a drug to be approved,” I answered.
    “The article suggests that they’re making great strides,” he answered mildly. Bob never becomes argumentative.
    “But they’re still a very long way from getting it on the market.” I often become argumentative.
    “This field of research is enormously active.”
    “But the time horizon is very long.”
    Etc., etc., etc.
    It’s not often that I find myself telling Bob that he’s being overly optimistic. He emphasizes the importance of rational, probabilistic decision making, and he practices this discipline himself, with yellow notepads with “pros” and “cons” columns, a habit of gathering multiple viewpoints, a detached “Markets go up, markets go down” outlook. In this situation, however, he chose to take an optimistic view of the evidence. Why argue with him? I didn’t agree with his view, but I’m no doctor, what did I know?
    My new aspirations for my behavior were high but not unreasonable. I knew that my combativeness and pedantry in this conversation came not from petty irritation but from a desire to protect myself against false hopes. Bob was taking the positive route, and I would have felt better if I’d let the issue go without arguing. I’m sure I made Bob, and certainly Jamie, feel worse by saying discouraging things, and being quarrelsome just made me feel bad. Fight right—not just with your husband but with everyone.
    On a less lofty note, I also learned not to eat half a pound of M&M’s on an empty stomach.
    NO DUMPING.
    For my research on learning how to “Fight right,” I had acquired an extensive library of books on marriage and relationships.
    “Anyone who looks at our shelves is going to think that our marriage is in trouble,” Jamie observed.
    “Why’s that?” I asked, startled.
    “Look what you’ve got here. The Seven Principles for Making MarriageWork . Love Is Never Enough. Babyproofing Your Marriage. Uncoupling . One Man, Hurt. I’d be worried myself if I didn’t know what you were working