Personal Stories
As a long-time owner of an auto body repair business in a drastically changing market, I became burned out. I sold the business and the shop and retired. It was kind of fun at first, but then depression set in. Having way too much time on my hands, I started partying, going to lunches and drinking all the time, which really took its toll on me. I thought of myself as a failure and thought that a drink made everything better. NOT SO! One afternoon after drinking, I tripped on something on the floor and fell full force into a side table, hitting the very sharp corner with my head. I was, bleeding profusely, and though I was still conscious, and I was taken to the hospital.
I spent a week in the hospital. My doctor told me to quit drinking, and I did. That week in the hospital gave me a lot of time to think about what I’ve done to myself and how I was dumb and selfish for doing it.
The doctor referred me to a hepatology specialist in Petaluma. He was not too encouraging regarding my condition; however I remained positive. The liver specialist referred me to the head surgeon in the liver transplant department at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. He told me like it was: If I didn’t get a liver I would die. Staying away from alcohol after that was not difficult, since my life hung in the balance.
The diagnosis was End Stage Liver Disease, which is fatal if not treated properly. That diagnosis got my attention. From that point on I fully complied with doctors’ orders and recommendations. My lab results were getting better, but I could feel my body getting weaker and shutting down. I experienced several episodes of encephalopathy. I was jaundiced and full of fluid. I also had diabetes, partly due to all the different medications that I was on, which threw my blood sugar level off.
I wondered why I got this disease after drinking heavily only a few years, when other people I knew had been drinking heavily practically their whole lives and were still relatively healthy. The one possibility is that since I had been in the auto body business for many years, I had been breathing in toxins from paint spray and other chemicals on a daily basis; so already my liver was working harder than normal to clean those toxins out, and may already have been damaged. Then by starting to drink heavily, the combined effect of the toxic substances and alcohol probably caused greater damage than either one would have caused by itself. But I didn’t realize any of this, because I had no symptoms.
After a period of time of being alcohol-free and in full compliance with my physicians’ orders, I was finally put on a list to receive a liver transplant, my only hope for survival.
Next: My wait for a liver transplant
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