PORT ANGELES — The accidental needle prick didn’t hurt much 20-some years ago, certainly not enough for Christine Hurst to remember.
What she’ll never forget is how it turned her life inside out.
“I was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 1998 after several years of having chronic fatigue and flu-like symptoms, but never getting really sick,” she said last week in Clallam County’s Health and Human Services Department.
There, she manages its health programs. She’s been a public health worker most of her life.
“To the best of my tracking back, I was infected in the 1980s by a needle stick,” she said. “I was doing blood draws in Arizona at the time.”
Hurst was “tested for everything under the sun,” including HIV.
At one point, doctors diagnosed her chronic fatigue as a brain disorder and prescribed anti-depressants.
“I just knew something was wrong,” she said.
“I spent two years trying to express to a doctor what this chronic fatigue was like.”
