Blond and beautiful, Stephanie Mason could have easily been mistaken for a film star, adult business or otherwise. Mason did work in the adult business for a time by providing craft services, but currently isn't. Mason, however, is taping a Leeza Gibbons show segment Friday because Mason is currently battling Hepatitis C. She claims she got it from someone who's still active in the adult business.
Mason: "Hepatitis C is deadly and it's something you should be taking medicine for. I'm on it. It's like chemotherapy. The person I got it from is in the business and I found some horrible facts out that scare me. This person is having sex with someone that's in the circuit. She's doing porno movies. This really terrifies me. I don't know if you know anything about Hep C, but I think there's a lot the adult business doesn't realize about it.
"What I'm going through is like chemo. I've lost my hair. I've lost like 45 pounds. I can't go anywhere, I can't do anything. I don't want to be seen by anyone. For the first four months I just sat in bed and cried. Chemo's horrible. But then my girlfriend took me to Alaska and since then I've been out of the house as much as I can even though I feel terrible. But that's life. My hair will grow back. I will gain the weight back. I will get better, and I'm in remission. But the person I got it from still hasn't gone to the doctor and his doctor is the same one as mine. But that's not my problem. My problem is that he's now living with a porn star. He's sleeping with her, and this is a problem to other people in the business. For a fact he's got hepatitis. For a fact she's sleeping with him. What he says is this, 'Why wear a condom? By the time somebody else gets it, they're going to have a cure.' He's having sex with talent and talent is having sex with him.
"No one should have to go through what I'm going through and for him to be doing this is really bad news for other people. I don't care if he knows it's me that told on him. For a year he made me say that it was from a train accident in 1995. He told me that nobody would want me. I believed that. I was insecure."
[In 1995, Mason was riding an all-glass observation train that was travelling from Munich to Innsbruck. Her train collided with another oncoming passenger train. During the course of the accident, Mason's eyeball actually dislodged from the socket. She spent a year recuperating. We'll continue Mason's story tomorrow, but we talked to AIM Healthcare's Sharon Mitchell about Hepatitis C and its inherent dangers to the business.]
Mitchell: "We do a lot of Hep-C testing. There are some people who've left the industry because they have Hep-C, and there are some people who have converted to condom-only status because they have Hep-C. I can tell you that the statistics that are coming out more recently, do not necessarily put this in a sexually transmitted disease category. But remember all these things change when we're dealing with porn. In porn we have extreme sex and we have multiple sex partners over and over again.
"Hepatitis C is real famous for being like if you share straws [snorting cocaine], and, obviously, if you're sharing needles, sharing razor blazes. Remember, when you're living with someone, you're doing other things besides having sex with them. They're not sure it's a sexually transmitted disease, not that they're not ruling it out, either. So there's not enough really known about it. I know that there's been a lot of people diagnosed within the industry, but, remember 15 to 35% of the people grow out of it. Just like Hepatitis B or A. A lot of people make their own antibodies and fight it themselves."
G. Ross: "Is this curable?"
Mitchell: "The liver is one of the few organs that can rejuvenate itself, and there are some good combination therapies with Rebetron and Interferon. But these are typically the combination therapies where the side affects are really brutal. There's vomiting, stomach cramps, pains in the back of the legs. How it can spread is in a multitude of ways.
"The incubation period is two to 25 weeks. The average is seven to nine weeks. How is it spread? Contact with infected blood, obviously - needles, razors, tattoo or body piercing tools; infected mothers to newborn. All my information says that it's not spread easily through sex. People at risk are people with blood transfusions, particularly before 1992 because that's when we know they started screening the blood; IV drug users, hemodialysis patients, infants born to infected mothers and multiple sex partners."
G. Ross: "Is it hard to say that a particular person gave it to someone?"
Mitchell: "When there's multiple sex partners, yes. A large portion of us got it years ago. A lot of people got it when we were all getting loaded, sharing straws and getting high. A lot of people don't even know that they have it until they get a biopsy or a liver scan."
G. Ross: "What are the symptoms?"
Mitchell: "Chronic fatigue, joint pain, night sweats, liver inflammations...it gets you very tired."
Mitchell says she had it in 1992 and is now one of the 15% in whom it's not detectable. "I grew out of it, luckily," she says. "But because it's not easily sexually spread, it's hard to say who gave it to you. I don't know how anyone can prove that."
