2008 - January

Jim and I start out the year with an organic diet. In December my mom had given me the book “The Great Physician’s Rx for Health and Wellness” by Jordan Rubin. The author tells his story of medical issues and while my issues have been no where near as severe as his, there were elements I could relate with all too well and it brought me to tears. So I am inspired to change my diet to natural, unprocessed foods and organic as much as possible for at least 40 days – if nothing else than to relieve my liver of some of its filtering work. Jim volunteers to do the same. I also decide to just cut out alcohol all together; so New Year’s Eve I had my last drinks. It took a while to get used to the diet as it is a lot of work to eat so fresh. But Jim and I were both feeling better AND losing weight.

January 7th - we met with the new liver specialist, Dr. K and I really like him. He’s easy to talk to, seems patient and motivated to get to the bottom of my case. I tell my story and explain how we are trying to start a family and hoping that more clarity on my liver situation would give Dr. OB comfort in proceeding with more aggressive treatment.

He has a preliminary guess as to what I have and it is called Primary Biliary Cirrhosis (PBC). We are excited at the prospect of having an actual diagnosis with a name and potential treatment. Dr. K will pull all my information from the first GI doctor and run new blood tests and wants to know how I feel about him basically starting from scratch. I told him I was fine with that as far as non-invasive tests were concerned, but wanted to pause before doing anything invasive (such as a liver biopsy) and really make sure I understand why it would be necessary. That was fine with him.

Alkaline Phospate: 701 [27-142]
AST/SGOT: 139 [1-45]
ALT (SGPT): 194 [1-55]

Dr. K also asked if I had any rashes or other skin stuff. I pointed out to him a spot on my left shoulder and he didn’t think it was related to my liver and guessed it was ringworm. He couldn’t do anything about that so suggested I see my general doc.


January 8th - I called the Primary Doctor’s office and they got me in that day to see the nurse. She didn’t think it was ringworm and didn’t know what it was. So she gave me some cream to put on it so I could “wait and see”.