On Being Tired

I get asked from time to time regarding my health, "How are you feeling?"

It is not always the easiest question to answer. For one, it depends on who is asking. Some people generally want to know, while others seem to ask the question out of courtesy, as though some unwritten code suggests they have to. It is somewhat peculiar, to say the least, and I find it quite odd when I realize that they actually didn't want to know; they were just making light conversation.

It is a fine line and I've come to recognize the sincerity of the question when I hear it. I wish I could tell people everything that is happening with me in five sentences or less. That would be nice. But it isn't possible.

I was thinking about this the other day when somebody asked me that very question and all I could say was, "Pretty damn lousy."

It is direct and to the point, and very descriptive. But my response was a little too forward and I'm afraid I left them feeling a little uncomfortable as they walked away.

When I first started this blog I went looking for other blogs that had to do with liver transplants and I found quite a few of them. One of them was The Real Life - My Journey Living with Cirrhosis to Transplant by Nancy White Real. At the time Nancy had just had her transplant and she was starting her journey to recovery.

I spent a great deal of time reading through her post and found that I identified with a lot of the symptoms she described. There were a number of post in particular that caught my eye and that I could relate to. Two of them had to do with tiredness. Tiredness is perhaps one of the hardest things I have struggled with since all of this started. I am constantly in a state of exhaustion.

Today I was reminded of this as I finally had to surrender to it and come home. I was also nursing a bad stomach ache on top of it. While I was at work I wanted nothing more than to find a place to curl up and take a nap, and if I could have found a place I would have logged in on break and done just that. As it was, I finally went home and slept for three hours. I am feeling much better now.

The following is a post that I read on Nancy's blog. It is a description of how we people going through liver failure begin to feel after our health begins to fade. I thought that its message was one worth revisiting because it says a lot about the transplant patient and his/her symptoms, and it provides remarkable insight into how a person going through chronic liver failure often feels. This is an excerpt from a book she found. I am not really sure what the name of the book is, but the name of her post was called:
Extreme Tiredness in Liver Disease