Your Times They Are A Changing

(I guess we see what we want to see. We hear what we need to hear. We believe whatever it is we want to believe. That is perhaps until the moment when the hand of God sweeps down and swats you across the head. This is what I believed anyways. I still believed that I was going to be alright. I did not get my swat on the head at this meeting. It would be at my next.)

I was released from the hospital on March 15, 2008. I was sore and tired and I went back to work later that week. My next appointment was with the liver specialist about 2 weeks later. I suppose I had a lot of time to think about everything that had happened. But even so, the reality of everything hadn’t sunk in yet. I knew that I was going to have to stay on the purple pill for the rest of my life. You can’t have a varices bleed and walk away from it without fixing it somehow. Taking the acid reflux medicine was the best thing I could do for myself. The pills would help the lining of my inner walls sort of speak. I needed no weakness there. And I would have to go on a beta blocker. This would help control the blood pumping through the veins by reducing the bloods pressure flow. The blood that was rushing through my body was backing up because my liver was failing. And as a result it was finding new places to go. In my case I ended up with an esophageal varices bleed.
At my appointment the resident came in first to ask me a bunch of questions. Had I ever had a bleed before? How did I generally feel? Was I tired? Did I ever feel sick or get nauseated? Did I stay up late at night and cat nap in the afternoons? Dozens of questions were asked; all of them had to do with the signs and symptoms of liver failure.
After the doctor came in and we talked for a while, he explained to me that I was going to need to have a liver transplant. But first we would have to take a lot of tests and then find out where my MELD score was. Many things would have to happened before I was even considered for a transplant.
I went home feeling good about the things I'd learned. I liked the doctors I had talked to. I knew that I was in a precarious position from the moment all of this started, but I didn't really get it until later. One month later.
In the meantime I went about my business, There was a CT scan, a dental appointment and I had to see a podiatrist about something happening with my foot. Life moved on. I moved on. Until that next appointment. There things would change. I would change.