I had to have a complete liver transplant. I waited with a beeper for a year and 10 months to get that gift.
I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased. Then again, I don't know a thing about my illness; I'm not even sure what hurts.
This is a year and a few months after the transplant. Before I had it my doctors told me that it would be the biggest thing that I ever had to face and believe me, when they take your liver out of ya and put another one in it's like replacing a football in your stomach.
I dropped about 20 pounds in the blink of an eye. And then when you see it in the mirror, when all of a sudden you pull your eyes down, and the bottom of your eyes go yellow and jaundice sets in - then you know something's wrong.
The medication I had to take was a form of chemotherapy. You feel like death every day. No appetite. No energy. But the treatment worked. It cured my liver 80 per cent but compromised my kidneys.
Alcohol remained, and remains, a vital instrument of social control, used without any regard to its horrifying consequences in addiction and violence.
So, I didn't get moved up because of celebrity status or anything like that. I got in line, and I passed the test. And they realized that I was sick enough, and as soon as the liver became available, I got one.
I don't know if hep C is called 'the quiet killer,' but it easily could be, so unnoticeably does it nestle into your body before crankin' up the screws and letting you race to figure out what's going on.
To produce foie gras, ducks and geese are force-fed enormous amounts of grain and fat, which causes their livers to swell to many times the normal size.
I'm living proof that Hepatitis C can be contained and that ZZ Top cannot.
I have a liver disease where my autoimmune system is fighting against itself.
I had to have a complete liver transplant.
Since I got my new liver, some of my tastes have changed. There are certain things I don't like anymore. I loved Indian food before but not now.
LIVER, n. A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious with. The liver is heaven's best gift to the goose; without it that bird would be unable to supply us with the Strasbourg "pate".
Well, I know how the system works. I know that there's something called the MELD system, which is nationwide. There are zones as far as evaluation of need for liver transplants.
I have a beer belly.
My MELD score was pretty high. And the worse you get on that scale, the sooner you get a transplant. It's based on how sick you are. And believe me, I was pretty sick.
A lot of Asians and Asian-Americans have liver problems. If you basically ask anybody who is Asian, they or one of their relatives will have some sort of a liver issue, and the liver actually falls into the jurisdiction of the gastroenterologist.
Hep is a very dangerous disease that can cause a number of permanent conditions, including death, which is extremely permanent.
I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.
A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it.
End-stage liver disease refers to a liver that's failing, and a very high percentage of those livers are what we call cirrhotic, or the patient's liver has become cirrhotic, and what cirrhosis is, is the scarring of the liver tissue.
When a liver becomes cirrhotic, those are the common complications. We see that the patients have bleeding from their stomach and intestines. They have abdomens that become full of fluid. Their ankles swell with the same type of fluid, and they also can become confused and not themselves. Those are kind of the main things that we see when people get end-stage liver disease and have cirrhosis.
I had liver disease. I'm completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer.
Jaundice is the disease that your friends diagnose.
