Reliving that day!

I'm starting a blog on living with liver disease.
so bare with me, because I'm going to take you back in time, to let you know the gist of things...

it all started in 2005. i remember  it like it was yesterday. i was a junior in high school, on a youth church trip to Nashville at "acquire the fire". skillet was in concert that night, and i started feeling really sick, like, going to the bathroom every five minutes to throw up. i stayed sick the whole weekend, and on throughout the weeks. i went to church one Wednesday night, and i got tired of people asking me "why are you yellow?"..it made no sense to me what in the world they were talking about.

after church that night, i went to the youth pastor, Shad and asked him if my eyes were yellow. the reason i asked is because his wife is a nurse. so i went and asked her. she told me to have my mom take me to the Dr. or the ER. at this point i was scheduled to be in court for truancy, because i was sleeping so much that i would miss 3-4 days a week of school. i told my mom that i had a lot of my friends at school keep telling me that i was "yellow" and that Shad's wife Mary told me to go to the Dr.

so my mom took off work at lunch and took me to the hospital. luckily Mary was working that day and stayed in the room with me and my mom. to help us understand all the medical terms of what was going on.
the diagnosis i got was far from what i ever wanted to hear. the Emergency room Dr. told me that i was pregnant and had hepatitis C. and BOY WAS HE WRONG!.. considering i was 17, never had sex. how could i be pregnant? so we made an appointment with our family Dr. and went to see him. he did a numerous amount of tests, went back a few days later for the results on the blood work. and that's when it went down hill from there. we found out what liver enzymes and bilirubin and hepatitis really is.

the Dr. said in his 35 years of practice, he had never seen someone with such high liver enzymes and bilirubin.
bilirubin is what makes you jaundice, its the blood work that shows how well your bile ducts in the liver are working. its supposed to be at or below a "1". mine was "42". i was extremely yellow, but my family couldn't tell because they were so used to seeing my all the time. the hepatitis A,B,C, and D blood work all came back negative. while the office was closed for lunch, we went to get a bite to eat, and have an ultrasound done at the local hospital, by that time the Dr. office called my mom and told us to come back to the office. that they were still closed for lunch, but Dr. Daniels wanted to talk to us, so they would open up the door for us.

when we got there we sat in the waiting room for the Dr. he came out and sat and talked with me and my mom. he told us that there is an ambulance waiting for us at the hospital for, we needed to get over there and meet them, that he was sending me to Vanderbilt children's hospital, to be seen by three Dr's. (Gillis, Branner and Jones). that he didn't know what was wrong with me besides i was critically ill. and he assured my mom that they would take good care of me.

that's enough for this blog. ill fill you in on what they did at Vanderbilt tomorrow.