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Cinematically Sick - Cirrhosis, Hair Loss & Curls?
One thing about me is that, believe it or not, I have never been a particularly vain person. Was I in a sorority? Yes. Have I always worn makeup? Also yes. But my hair? Absolutely not. I am, with deep respect to myself, one of the least skilled full heads of hair this side of the Mississippi.
Which makes the hair loss even stranger emotionally. Because it was not about being precious with my blowout routine. There was no blowout routine. There was barely a routine at all. But hair still becomes part of your identity, even when your bad hair days are part of your brand. And when mine started falling out, it felt like the disease had finally learned my name.
Insomnia
How does a disease famous for making you tired also make it impossible to sleep?
For many people with cirrhosis, the sleepless nights stick around long after the panic fades. You're exhausted all day, wide awake all night, and somehow living on a schedule that feels completely disconnected from the rest of the world.
What starts as stress can eventually become something else entirely… a sleep-wake cycle that no longer seems to follow the clock.
Accidentally Inciting Ascites
Navigating the hidden fallout of advanced fluid retention is the ultimate exercise in physical vulnerability. It strips away your structural comfort, hijacks your body's plumbing baseline, and forces you to play a high-stakes guessing game against an internal tsunami that is actively expanding behind your back.
My Brain Betrayed Me: Navigating Hepatic Encephalopathy
Navigating the hidden fallout of Hepatic Encephalopathy is the ultimate exercise in vulnerability. It strips away your privacy, hijacks your telemetry, and forces you to play a high-stakes guessing game using the exact instrument that is actively being compromised.
But finding your footing inside this quiet, frustrating maze means realizing that your boundaries are still yours to build. You are not a broken machine or a collection of bowel analytics; you are a human being fighting a calculated, metabolic heavyweight battle every single second.
Portal Hypertension & Movie Plot Plagiarism
Portal hypertension is one of those cirrhosis complications that, looking back, absolutely should have terrified me more than it did. But in the chaos of Winter 2024, it honestly did not make the leaderboard.
And that is not because portal hypertension is boring. In fact, it is arguably one of the most cinematic, body-horror-adjacent concepts in all of liver disease. I think it just sounded too absurd at the time to emotionally process. Because when doctors first started explaining it to me, all I really heard was: your liver is scarred, the blood cannot move correctly, pressure is building, veins can rupture, and technically yes, one in your neck could explode.
And I remember thinking:
That sounds medically dramatic.
That sounds fear-mongery.
That sounds like somebody got a little too excited in the pathology textbook section.
Because how does: “my liver is sick” somehow become: “my veins are auditioning for a low-budget horror film”? The escalation felt narratively unreasonable.
Did My Liver Change My Vision?
Within a few months, my vision changed so dramatically that I ended up in an expensive, deeply annoying optometrist spiral: three separate visits, three new prescriptions, three different pairs of glasses.
I thought I was aging.
I thought my eyes were just being dramatic.
I thought I had an eye problem.
Turns out, I may have been optimizing for the wrong organ.
Because advanced liver disease does not politely stay in the liver lane. It affects metabolism, inflammation, hormones, nutrition, fluid balance, blood vessels, and sometimes, apparently, your ability to see the world clearly.
Jaundice
Abnormal yellowing in chronic liver failure exists on a highly specific developmental spectrum. Transient (or situational) jaundice is a brief, temporary spike in pigment levels—such as a mild flare after a temporary drug reaction or a passing bout of dehydration—that resolves quickly once the trigger is removed. Hepatic jaundice is an ingrained, systemic failure where a cirrhotic liver’s structural collapse simultaneously destroys its ability to process cellular waste and mechanically blocks the internal plumbing of the bile ducts .
