Remembrance of Christmases past
For some years, a few of my friends were always waiting to see what misfortune would befall me around Christmas time, since a couple of my past Christmases weren’t too lucky…
Christmas 1993
I’d been feeling ill for a couple of weeks, with flu-like symptoms that I couldn’t seem to shake off. A visit to the doctor a few days before Christmas resulted in the prescription of a course of penicillin. On Christmas Day, I woke to be told by my then girlfriend, “My God, you’re yellow!” Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I saw what she meant. My skin was yellow. The whites of my eyes weren’t white, but… you’ve guessed it. Then as I was having a pee, the girlfriend (now on the phone to her mother, the fount of all medical knowledge) called, “Mum wants to know what colour your urine is.” “Like strong tea,” I replied. “You’ve got jaundice,” came the instant diagnosis.
Of course, doctors only deal with emergency cases over the Christmas holiday, and while I felt like shit I didn’t think I was in any danger — so I planned to contact the quack when the surgery re-opened on December 27. When I woke up on the morning of the 27th, I found that I was no longer yellow, oh no. From the neck down, and all over, I was purple. My doctor came out to see me, and established that I had two problems:
- The worst case of mononucleosis (glandular fever, or the “kissing disease”) she had ever seen. When mononucleosis is bad enough, it affects the liver, explaining the jaundice. Most people who get mononucleosis get it in their teens (not for nothing is it known as the kissing disease); me, I waited until I’d just turned 37.
- The purple explosion south of my neck was likely an allergic reaction to the penicillin I’d been prescribed a few days beforehand.
The treatment was a different antibiotic, along with antihistamines and a steroid cream to deal with the effects of the allergy. Over the coming days, my skin gradually returned to normal. But the mononucleosis had me completely floored for the next two months. It can be a very debilitating condition: I was sapped of all energy, and every little thing I did exhausted me and brought me out in a sweat. So I mainly sat around and did nothing much. Tests showed that the mononucleosis had brought on non-infectious hepatitis, and my liver function was way out of whack, so I was ordered not to drink alcohol. Not that I felt like it anyway.
Eventually the worst symptoms receded, and I was able to start working again and to regain control of my life. But I was constantly tired, and looking back, I can see that this on top of a bunch of other factors was partly responsible for the break-up of a three-year relationship. Problems I might have been able to deal with more effectively had I not been so run-down just couldn’t be faced feeling the way that I did.
My doctor was concerned that my liver function wasn’t returning to normal; in particular, my gamma-GT results were still about three times the normal maximum level, months after the mononucleosis had subsided. So she sent me to the Liver Clinic at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, to be seen, as it happens, by the top man in the country for liver problems (it’s always reassuring to know you’re dealing with the best).
After an examination in which he determined that my liver didn’t seem to be unusually tender or enlarged, the good Doctor F decided that I should have a biopsy performed, to check out the tissue itself. Given the state of the National Health Service, I expected to wait weeks or months for an appointment to come through. I was knocked off my feet when I came home one day about a week later to find a message on my answering machine. And not from an admissions clerk or some other admin bod, but from a Staff Nurse in the hospital ward dealing with liver complaints. I called her back, and she asked me if I could come in for the biopsy.
“When?” I asked.
“How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?!”
So, I explained that I was (at that time) half of a two-man business, and that I had commitments to clients and couldn’t just drop into hospital tomorrow for a quick operation.
“So how soon could you make it?”
“Erm… how about next Wednesday?”
“Fine, Wednesday it is.”
In another refreshing elimination of red tape, she told me that rather than having to report to Hospital Admissions or other such nonsense, I was to come directly to the relevant ward.
The whole business was quick and simple; I only spent two nights in hospital. The biopsy was performed as a “keyhole” procedure under only local anaesthetic. The surgeon made a little cut in my belly to poke an endoscope through. He also injected air or a gas into my abdomen to blow it up so he could move the endoscope around freely. That was a little uncomfortable, but otherwise I couldn’t feel a thing. He looked around the liver and snipped off a bit of tissue for laboratory examination, and I watched the whole process on a monitor. Watching someone poking around at your internal organs is actually a lot less gruesome than it sounds.
The results of the examination and the pathology on the tissue sample indicated that while there was a little expected inflammation, there was no sign of necrosis or cirrhosis of the liver tissue, which was all good news. The consultant had no explanation as to why my liver function was still whacko, so decided that he should keep a watching brief on it just to make sure it didn’t get any worse.
Throughout what remained of 1994, I continued to feel better, until Christmas Eve, when…
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