DRAFT ___ A Canary in the Crypt: Jaundice, MMA & Friendsgiving
Important Medical Disclaimer: I am Angie, a cirrhosis patient sharing my personal lifestyle, nutrition, and mindset journey. I am a data aggregator and community builder, not a licensed medical professional, doctor, or dietitian. Content on diagnosiscirrhosis.com is based solely on my personal experience living with advanced liver disease and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice or a substitute for professional medical care. Always follow the recommendations of your own healthcare team and consult your physician before changing your diet, medication, or lifestyle routine.
@diagnosis_cirrhosis 🟡 Why are my eyes yellow? Why is my skin turning yellow? 👀🪞 If you’ve ever stared in the mirror at 2 AM thinking, “can liver disease make your eyes yellow?” or “does yellow eyes mean liver failure?” you are not alone 😵💫 Yellow eyes or yellow skin can happen when a waste compound called bilirubin builds up in your body 🧪🟡 That yellowing is called jaundice — but most people do not search “jaundice” first. They search: “why are my eyes yellow?” “why is my skin turning yellow?” “what should I do if my eyes turn yellow?” Because that is what they can actually see 👀 — 🩸 Where does bilirubin come from? Every day, your body breaks down old red blood cells 🩸♻️ That creates bilirubin. Normally, your liver acts like a filtration plant 🏭 It collects bilirubin, processes it, packages it into bile, and helps move it out of your body 🚽🧪 — 🌊 The lake analogy Think of bilirubin like water flowing into a lake 🌊 💧 Healthy liver: Water flows in, gets processed, and flows out. The lake level stays normal. ⚠️ Damaged liver: Water keeps rushing in… but processing slows down 🐌 or the exit pipes get blocked 🚧 The lake starts rising. And rising. And rising. 🌊 Eventually, it spills over. Except instead of flooding a field… it shows up as yellow eyes and yellow skin 🟡👀 — 🍷 Can alcohol cause yellow eyes? Yes. Alcohol-related liver disease can cause bilirubin to build up, especially when alcohol injures the liver enough that it cannot process bilirubin normally 🚫🍷 Yellow eyes can happen with alcohol-related hepatitis, cirrhosis, or severe liver inflammation. So if you are searching “can alcohol cause yellow eyes?” or “why are my eyes yellow after drinking?” please do not ignore it 🩺 — 👀 Does blurry vision mean yellow eyes? Not exactly. Blurry vision usually does not cause yellow eyes. But vision changes, fatigue, lighting, or staring in the mirror can make you suddenly notice something looks off 👀🪞 So if you are wondering “does blurry vision mean yellow eyes?” or “can vision changes make yellow eyes noticeable?” the key is this: yellowing is about a color change in the whites of the eyes, not just needing new glasses. — 🚨 Why doctors care Yellow eyes are not the diagnosis. They are the warning light. They can mean bilirubin is building up because something is disrupting the system. That could be: 🫀 cirrhosis 🔥 hepatitis 🍩 fatty liver disease / MASLD / MASH 🚫🍷 alcohol-related liver disease 🚧 bile duct blockage 💊 drug-induced liver injury 🩸 red blood cell breakdown ❓ or other causes So yes, if you are searching “can fatty liver disease cause yellow eyes?” or “can fibrosis cause yellow eyes?” the answer is: it depends on severity and what else is happening, but yellow eyes should always be taken seriously. — 👩⚕️👨⚕️🩺 Talk to a doctor or hepatologist immediately if you notice yellowing eyes or yellowing skin. Especially with: 🟡 dark urine ⚪ pale stool 🔥 fever 🤢 nausea/vomiting 😵 confusion 💧 swelling 🩸 bleeding/bruising 😴 extreme fatigue 🍷 alcohol use 📈 known liver disease The cause matters more than the color 💚 #symptoms #yelloweyes #liverhealth #alcoholism #fattyliver ♬ Palm Haze - Dust and Whisper
By Angie from @diagnosis_cirrhosis on TikTok
Let me tell you about the day I turned yellow.
Because as I talked about in my ascites experience, jaundice was by far the first symptom that made a pronounced entrance into my decompensation.
Not the first symptom.
Just the first one with stage presence.
Fatigue could be blamed on life.
Insomnia could be blamed on stress.
Appetite loss could be blamed on my body freelancing without a permit.
Tiny red dots on my chest could be filed under: concerning, but vague enough to ignore until further notice.
But yellow?
Yellow read liver.
Immediately.
That was the part that stunned me.
The second I turned yellow, everyone around me seemed to understand the assignment before I did. Suddenly people were looking at me and thinking liver, and I was looking at them thinking:
How?
How would you know that?
What textbook did all of you secretly read?
Was there a community seminar I missed?
Maybe babies. Everybody knows babies can get jaundice. Everybody has a baby but me. Maybe that is where the general public picked up this information. I do not know.
But somehow, yellow entered the room with a label already attached to it.
Liver.
And I was behind everyone else, standing there in my own skin, trying to catch up.
The night before was unremarkable.
And as you know, in medicine, “unremarkable” means a lot.
Nothing dramatic happened. No cinematic warning. No ominous music. No thunderclap over the hepatobiliary system.
I was at a friend’s house.
For reasons still unknown to historians, roughly twelve of us had gathered to watch a pay-per-view fight between people whose names we did not know, in a sport whose rules none of us could confidently explain.
But you would have thought we had bet the neighborhood clubhouse on the outcome.
We were invested.
Wildly.
Incorrectly.
Baselessly.
The kind of invested people become when they are standing in a kitchen, holding paper plates, shouting advice at professional athletes through a television while possessing no relevant qualifications except proximity to dip.
Then the internet went out.
Naturally.
And suddenly we were passing cell phone hotspots around like classified military intelligence.
One phone to the next.
Hotspot hot potato.
Someone yelling, “Try mine.”
Someone else holding their phone toward the ceiling like it was receiving divine instruction.
A pay-per-view fight nobody understood, sustained by the technological equivalent of CPR.
And I think about that now.
How sometimes the little quilted stitches of your life carry the same thread before you know what pattern they are making.
A fight.
A holiday.
A body about to declare war in a color everyone else could read before I could.
A happenstance pay-per-view fight foreshadowing the most feud-fueled family-adjacent event of the year, which would then collapse into the fight of my life.
That is an arc they do not sell at Blockbuster.
Or if they did, maybe that is why it went out of business.
And yes, I know the question people want to ask.
Were you drinking?
Yes.
There were a few White Claws.
And here is where explaining alcohol gets strange, because there is no version of the answer that does not feel like someone is standing underneath it with a trapdoor.
Too much?
Not enough?
Often?
Rarely?
Did you know?
Did you not know?
Were you reckless?
Were you unlucky?
Were you already sick?
That is the hollow part of trying to explain drinking once liver disease enters the conversation.
No matter how plainly you say it, the bottom can fall out.
So yes, there were a few White Claws.
And no, the night did not feel remarkable.
That is what still bothers me.
It did not feel like the night before anything.
It felt like a neighborhood night.
I walked home like a normal person after a normal evening, probably batting mosquitoes off my arm, irritated by nothing larger than humidity, spotty Wi-Fi, and the general indignity of being asked to care about boxing.
I had no idea that within twelve hours my body would introduce me to a new definition of yellow.
A new definition of itch.
A new definition of fear.
A new definition of betrayal.
The next morning, I woke up and, lo and behold, it was Friendsgiving.
And if you know me, you know I love Thanksgiving.
I do not know why.
It is chaos.
My family fights every year. We make too much food. Somebody gets stuck with the dishes. The house gets hot. Everyone is lightly annoyed. At least one person is pretending they are not mad while aggressively scraping a casserole dish.
And yet, for some reason, I love it.
There is something about the simplicity of gathering around a meal.
Which is ironic, considering cirrhosis also taketh away.
Food becomes math.
Salt becomes strategy.
Protein becomes homework.
Appetite becomes unreliable.
And meals, which used to be about comfort, can suddenly feel like negotiations with a body that has started hiring outside counsel.
But that morning, I was not thinking about any of that yet.
That morning, I was preparing for the production of the year.
Friendsgiving is the one day I get to force all of my friends to sit around a table, choke down some turkey, and tell each other why we love each other until I am at my wit’s end, everyone’s bellies are full, and the kids are complaining.
It is a glorious event.
And I take it spectacularly seriously.
So I was up early.
Early early.
There was fall sangria that needed to soak all day. Green chile on the stove. A charcuterie plate to assemble, because naturally the pilgrims were snacking on the finest cheese and dried fruits Plymouth Rock could afford.
Actually, maybe they were.
That is kind of funny.
People were in and out of my house all morning.
Can we borrow the butter?
We forgot the milk.
So-and-so threw the measuring cup away.
What time are you going over there?
Do you have foil?
Who has the serving spoon?
It was chaotic bliss.
A shared experience.
Literally the exact thing I complain I have been abstracted from since getting sick.
Sitting around a table. Passing wine. Passing food. Laughing without turning every bite into a calculation. Existing in the old-world luxury of eating with people without thinking quite so much about what eating might cost.
That was what I was fighting so hard to get to.
And maybe, somewhere deep down, my body knew it was the last time it would ever exist that way for me.
Not the last meal.
Not the last Thanksgiving.
Not the last gathering.
But the last time the fantasy was intact.
The last time the table was just a table.
Before sodium became a number.
Before protein became a chore.
Before appetite became suspicious.
Before the very act of eating became something my body could punish me for later.
The green chile was on the stove.
And the green chile matters because I make it constantly. It is one of those family dishes that becomes less of a recipe and more of a household weather system. It is probably part of why I love Thanksgiving at all.
There is food, yes.
But there is also inheritance.
The chopping.
The stirring.
The same thing made again and again until it starts feeling like proof that life is still recognizable.
And I remember standing over that pot, swaying a little, looking down and wondering if I was stirring or if the spoon was.
Which is not normal.
But it felt normal.
That is one of the cruelest tricks of liver disease.
The warning signal can be screaming, but if it screams in the language of “tired human trying to survive the end of the year,” you can miss it.
The yellow light should have been red.
But it did not feel red yet.
It felt like being busy.
It felt like being exhausted.
It felt like soldiering on.
And sickness does not always interrupt you in the way you think it will.
Sometimes it does not arrive as a collapse.
Sometimes it lets you keep stirring the green chile.
Sometimes the underworld opens beneath the most ordinary floorboards in your house, and you are still standing there asking whether anyone needs more foil.
Then I took a shower.
And that shower hurt.
Not the water.
The act.
For the first time in my entire life, I remember thinking:
Wow.
Showers might be dangerous.
Not slippery-bathtub dangerous.
Not “someone should buy a bath mat” dangerous.
I mean gothic-heroine-on-the-wet-floorboards dangerous.
Like I had been assigned the simple act of bathing by a cruel Victorian headmistress who wanted me dead before the second rinse.
And it was a hair-wash day.
If you know, you know.
A hair-wash shower is not bathing. It is a full-court press. It is a municipal infrastructure project. It is a hot-girl shower, allegedly, except I was less hot girl and more damp invalid being prepared for the fainting couch.
I got out and I was annihilated.
Not tired.
Annihilated.
The kind of spent that makes the bathroom feel too bright, the towel too heavy, the floor too far away, and the act of standing upright something your ancestors should have warned you about in a letter sealed with black wax.
Then the real horror set in.
I still had to do my hair.
I still had to do my makeup.
Because we dress for Thanksgiving.
Friendsgiving or not, these people see me all year round. I was not about to let whatever pictures were taken that day feature me with a belly full of turkey, saggy sangria eyes, and hair that looked like it had lost a custody dispute.
But I could not do it.
So I set an alarm.
Thirty minutes.
A tiny nap.
A reset.
A tactical retreat.
I slept.
I woke up.
Shit.
Back to buzzing.
The neighborhood had shifted from preparation into arrival. The butter emergencies had slowed. The milk had been found or mourned. The little domestic alarms were quieting. The meal was becoming inevitable.
I tried to sit down and do my makeup.
Immediately, I started negotiating away the day.
Hair and makeup were not both happening.
Absolutely not.
One would have to be sacrificed to the Friendsgiving gods.
So I took another nap.
Maybe an hour.
Maybe less.
Maybe more.
Time gets strange when your body is pulling a fire alarm and you still think it is just the smoke detector complaining about onions.
When I woke up, I felt awful.
You would have thought the night before we had been slamming Seagram’s like it was 2009 and I was back at a sorority fundraiser again.
But no.
I had watched a fight I did not understand, drank a few White Claws, survived a hostile shower, and somehow woke up feeling like my body had been dragged behind a parade float.
But it was Friendsgiving.
And the greatest crime, in my mind, would be missing appetizers.
Not liver failure.
Not an ominous change in skin color.
Appetizers.
By then, my husband had gotten home from wherever husbands go during the day, especially when you are busy cooking, destroying the kitchen, and using every pot and pan you own.
I gave him instructions.
Listen.
You have to get the charcuterie over there.
You have to get the sangria over there.
I just need to take a nap.
I am going to miss appetizers.
I do not want people waiting.
But I will be there.
I just need a nap.
This is the part that feels impossible to explain now.
That I was still coordinating logistics.
Still protecting the event.
Still thinking like a hostess.
My body was becoming a siren, and I was worried about punctual cheese.
So I laid down on the couch.
And it was the most haphazard slumber imaginable.
Not restful.
Not peaceful.
Not a sweet little holiday nap with cranberry-scented dreams.
It was the kind of sleep that feels less like sleeping and more like your body putting you in airplane mode without asking permission.
I had no idea this would be the nap to top all naps.
The coming-out story of the ages.
Woman turned Pikachu, just in time for pass the potatoes.
And not seasonally yellow.
Not autumnal.
Not “you look warm-toned today.”
I mean jaundice yellow.
Canary-in-the-crypt yellow.
Caution-tape cherub yellow.
Bilirubin had broken into the editing room of my face and slapped on the worst Instagram filter of all time.
Welcome to Neptune.
One of the biggest questions I get from people is:
Did it really happen that fast?
Are you sure?
And here is the thing.
Yes.
That is the terrifying part.
You can spend a whole day orbiting people who know you. People who love you. People who see you all the time. You can stand over a stove, nearly perish in a shower, negotiate with your own face like it is a difficult subcontractor, and still believe you are simply having a hard day.
Then you can close your eyes.
And open them.
And the room has changed.
It was a bizarre cyclone of monotony, normality, and transition.
All the small sacraments of ordinary life were swirling together.
Food.
Friends.
Wine.
Noise.
Obligation.
Dishes.
Kids complaining.
Everyone asking for butter.
The greatest celebration of human behavior had become the undercurrent of an underworld.
And my brain had no way to rectify that.
Because nothing had looked like a medical emergency from the inside.
It looked like Thanksgiving.
Then I opened my eyes.
And the first thing I realized was:
Oh my God.
It is dark outside.
It is not dark during Friendsgiving.
Nobody eats Friendsgiving at dark.
If you do, you are crazy and I do not know you.
Actually, I love the midnights, so maybe Friendsgiving at 3 a.m. is next year’s to-do list.
Hepatic-friendly, honestly.
But that was not the point.
The point was:
What happened?
My husband looked over at me and said, “Hey, babe. You were sleeping. You can’t.”
And I said, “What are you talking about? It’s Friendsgiving. I told you to wake me up. I told you it was just a little nap. How could you let me miss Friendsgiving?”
I was sure people were still there.
They had to be.
I started trying to get up.
I cannot even begin to tell you what the outfit I must have been wearing looked like, because nobody wears real clothes in November.
By November, we have all surrendered morals and laurels in favor of whatever spring florals are haunting the bottom drawer.
Laundry has collapsed. Standards are folklore. Everyone is wearing a sweater with questionable provenance and pretending it was intentional.
So I jumped up in whatever textile emergency I had cobbled together and prepared, with absolutely no evidence or physical ability, to march myself to Friendsgiving.
And then my husband looked at me.
And gasped.
Not a cute gasp.
Not a little “oh no” gasp.
A blood-curdling gasp.
The kind of sound that could only be produced inside an equally claustrophobic vessel system plagued by portal hypertension.
A gasp with architecture.
A gasp that turned the living room into a corridor.
And then he said:
“What the fuck is going on?”
Which is generally not the phrase you want to hear from someone looking directly at your face.
“You’re yellow.”
He kept saying it.
“You’re yellow. You’re yellow.”
And the thing about being told you are yellow is that you do not feel yellow.
You do not feel like a warning sign.
You do not feel like a medical textbook opened to the page everyone else apparently studied.
You feel like yourself.
A horrible version, maybe.
A tired version.
A version with wet hair, bad clothes, a half-formed argument, and a desperate need to get to appetizers.
But yourself.
There is a particular terror in having someone announce an appearance change you cannot feel.
It is not like being told you look tired.
It is like being told you have a twelfth toe.
And I do not have an eleventh toe either, so frankly eleven would have been equally traumatizing.
A new fact about your body has entered the room, and everyone seems to understand its consequences before you can even locate it.
Now, sidebar.
My husband is a professional panicker.
He is.
If he tells me there is a tornado warning, I know that means I should grab a light jacket.
That is just life with him.
He is not uncaring. He is not unhelpful. He is simply fully prepared for the apocalypse at all times, emotionally and logistically.
I am the practical one.
I am the one quietly renegotiating the Treaty of Versailles in a bathrobe, trying to convert “medical concern” into “voilà, we still get to go to dinner.”
So when he said yellow, I did not immediately think:
medical emergency.
I thought:
What?
Did I get turmeric on my face?
Did fall sangria fruit betray me?
Was there saffron involved?
Had I become seasonally stained?
I said, “No, I’m not. Hold on. I have to go.”
And he said, “You’re not going anywhere.”
He was not theatrically announcing my doom to the neighborhood.
That part matters.
Because I would not have allowed it.
At that point, I was still the big yellow sunburst in the room insisting everything was fine. Exhausted, furious, glowing like an OSHA violation, and fully committed to the thesis that this was not a big deal.
So when he called the neighbors, his voice did the containment performance.
The one where someone is trying to sound normal because the abnormal thing is standing close enough to hear them.
“Hey, guys,” he said. “We’re not going to make it.”
Pause.
“No, Angie just doesn’t feel well.”
Not panic.
Containment.
Not “something is terribly wrong.”
More like: please accept this polite cancellation while I quietly stare at my wife, who has become a legal pad with cheekbones and is still trying to invoke maritime law for appetizer access.
And that may be what made it scarier.
Because he knew.
I could tell he knew.
He knew it was a big deal, and I was telling him it was not, and for once in our entire marriage, the professional panicker was right.
That was the part my brain could not reconcile.
Not the yellow.
Not yet.
Not the medical meaning.
Not the bilirubin or the liver or the fact that my body had apparently staged a coup while I was asleep on the couch.
It was him.
The man I had cohabitated with through the most blissful marriage years of my youth.
The resident conspiracy theorist of household danger.
The scariest prophecy producer in the world.
The person who could turn a weather advisory into an evacuation plan.
The person who heard one strange noise and immediately entered witness-protection-level preparedness.
The person whose most far-fetched theory usually required a flashlight, bottled water, and me saying, “Please sit down.”
And this time, he was right.
About me.
About something awful.
That is a specific kind of nightmare.
Not just finding out something is wrong.
Finding out that the person who always imagined the worst had finally imagined correctly.
And somehow it had all happened inside a normal day.
A neighborhood night.
A stupid pay-per-view fight.
Hotspot hot potato.
Mosquitoes on the walk home.
Green chile on the stove.
Butter emergencies.
A hostile shower.
A couch nap.
A missed appetizer.
All these ordinary little beads strung together, and somewhere between them, my life split.
My favorite day was stolen in plain sight.
Not dramatically.
Not with thunder.
Not with a doctor walking in and saying the sentence.
It was stolen while I was trying to get to Friendsgiving.
While I was bargaining for hair and makeup.
While I was negotiating the Treaty of Versailles in a bathrobe.
While I was insisting, with the full authority of a woman who had no idea what was happening, that we were still going to dinner.
The night before, we had watched a fight nobody understood.
The next day, I woke up inside one.
And there is no way to make that neat.
No way to make the foreshadowing less insulting.
No way to soften the absurdity of a body turning canary-in-the-crypt yellow during the one day built around food, gratitude, noise, and belonging.
The whimsy of thankfulness had become a trapdoor.
The table was still somewhere nearby.
The people were still there.
The food was still warm.
And I was home, glowing like an omen, learning that sometimes the scariest story in the room is not exaggeration.
Sometimes it is the first accurate report.
That was the holy shit of it all.
A normal day had swallowed my favorite day whole.
My life had changed while I was asleep.
And the biggest panic on the planet had looked at me and, somehow, finally, been right.
