This is not much of a post. It’s been a bit since I whined about my medical problems so I thought I would give y’all a small update. I’ve been languishing in an oxymoronic purgatory, waiting to get worse so I can get better. I had to make another change in medical professionals treating me. I am still seeing the same liver doctor but I changed to a different nurse practitioner.

The NP does most of the hands on interaction with the patient (that would be me.) My original NP was a good guy and while I was at the office he seemed very good and answered my questions. The only problem was that when I left the office he seemed to forget about me and he was not very responsive to any form of communication I tried, be it phone call or e-mail. He also did not seem very concerned with the fact that my quality of life is in the shitter. Without getting into all the details I’ve written about before, I’ve been basically home bound for almost a year now. For an outdoorsy type of person this is hell. I’ve broken the rules a few times to scratch my itch and I’ve paid for it. My work has also been affected but thanks to a very understanding boss, I’ve been allowed to work from home. How long that arrangement will last is a constant concern of mine.

There is a relatively new process called a living liver transplant where a compatible donor can give up part of their liver. This partial liver will replace the diseased liver in the other person and will regenerate to a fully functional liver. There are a lot of other factors involved but my sister is a preliminary qualified candidate and has volunteered. She can’t get any other testing done until my doctor approves me for the procedure. When I brought this to my NP’s attention he seemed to downplay it and asked me why I would want to take the risk on a surgery when my lab numbers indicated that I was not in immediate danger. My response to him was that the life I was living now was no life and that I’d rather die on the surgery table than continue to live this way. That made an impact and he said he would work with the transplant coordinator to see what he could do.

A month later nothing had been done and with the help of my wife (I really suck at confrontation) I changed to my doctor’s other NP. I saw her yesterday and she was very supportive of what I wanted to do. She also made a statement that really made me feel glad that I switched to her. She said that numbers can only tell you so much about how a patient feels and she thinks that listening to the patient describe their quality of life should be factored into decision making. So with that, she is charging forward on my behalf. Hopefully we’ll see some results soon.

Since the symptoms of my condition are not always visibly apparent, I get a lot of questions about what is going on. Here is a video on YouTube that does a pretty good job explaining it with an artistic viewpoint. It’s long, but if you are interested, give it a view.

Enough of this. Next post will be either a story about how my Dad’s cheapness led to a funny incident, or one about how I enacted a plan to get electronic revenge on an ex-girlfriend when I was in high school. Any preference?

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