Demon in My Blood by Elizabeth Rains

Author:Elizabeth Rains
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2017-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

THE TINY JACKHAMMER

I FACED THE COMPUTER screen in my basement office. Outside the window, two tall cedar trees formed parallel lines toward the sky. They had been sheared of all branches up to thirty feet in order to reveal the ocean view. Clouds settled over the water, a quiet drizzle fell, and a storm blew through my mind. The demon was thundering through my liver, and my appointment with the hepatologist was two months away. I scoured the Internet, trying to find solace. Skipping from one web page to another, I thought I found good news: “The majority of people with chronic Hepatitis C will never develop a major complication related to this disease.”

Reading on, I realized that the statement seemed to apply only to those who had had hep for up to twenty years. The writer, Nicole Cutler, stated, “If undetected, ignored or untreated, Hepatitis C is more likely to develop into cirrhosis or liver cancer.”

A case in point: Jim Banta, the San Francisco construction worker who fell from the scaffolding at an elevator shed, learned that he had contracted hepatitis C and on the same day discovered that his liver had advanced to end-stage disease. “That’s pretty crazy,” he said on the phone to me. About a month after his fall, which broke two ribs, he spent ten days in the hospital, wracked with worry about his diagnosis. End-stage liver disease means what it implies. Jim was at the beginning of the end of his liver’s ability to function. The body can’t live without a liver, so the only recourse is a transplant.

For the next nine years Jim was never well enough to get a transplant. He was never well enough to endure hep C treatment, either. The standard treatment at the time was interferon, which was likely to make Jim’s difficult symptoms much worse. His symptoms from liver failure would spike, level off, and then progressively increase. He was often sick to his stomach, and his thoughts would become blurry. His blood contained too much ammonia, which is produced when the body digests proteins. With a damaged liver, excess ammonia can accumulate. The result is encephalopathy, or overall brain dysfunction, which affects memory, muscle control, and other brain functions. A normal or even fibrotic liver would get rid of ammonia, but Jim’s cirrhotic, decompensated liver could not. In 2009 Jim passed out at home, and his wife called an ambulance. He had fallen into a coma.

He was rushed to San Francisco General Hospital, where a shunt was placed through his liver, allowing blood traveling from the intestines to the heart to bypass the tangle of cirrhosis. The procedure worked for Jim. After several days in the coma, he woke up. The hospital stabilized him and transferred him to the UCSF (University of California–San Francisco) Medical Center Hospital, one of America’s leading transplant hospitals. After five and a half weeks at the hospital, he had lost seventy pounds, but he had also learned he would get a liver.

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