Friday, April 24, 2009

Turn and Face the Strange

There are all sorts of oddities and quirks that I have noticed are g-o-n-e post tx.

For instance, the aforementioned freakishly white eyes... I had been so accustomed for so long to having a lovely butter tint to the whites of my eyes that for the first several days (compounded by the reduction of visual acuity) my eyes did not seem my own.

When the liver is failing, it stops making the proteins and other such good stuff that knits the body together. One key thing is that the walls of blood vessels tend to get porous -- in fact, an indicator of liver disease is the presence of "spider angioma" which are little burst blood vessels underneath the skin... along with esophogeal varices, which are what they sound like - varicose blood vessels in the esophagus and the stomach. I had both -- I'd had the angioma as I was diagnosed... most prominently along my left arm and a burst vessel underneath my left eye (normally they are around the torso, I guess). Like the yellowness of my eyes of those were gone within 24 hours of surgery. [p.s. after reading more about this, it's likely that angioma are due to the liver's inability to keep estrogens where they belong...]

Also, in the beginning of March I had had my annual physical, and complained of chronic sinus problems and nosebleeds. The sinus issues are gone... I think possibly due to the gargantuan amounts of anti-everything I am taking... but no more nose bleeds. I have also not had a whit of heartburn... which was prevalent prior to tx even with anti-acids and bland food.

And one day about a week after returning home I looked in the mirror and I was verifiably PALE. Like, white. Not the "tan" most people noticed, not yellow, but just plain, ghostly white. Now, that wasn't all so healthy... but it was certainly different!!!

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