Cirrhosis has a way of making everything feel connected and completely unrelated at the same time.

Not every symptom feels like a “liver symptom” at first.
Some changes feel obvious. Others are easy to explain away as aging, stress, poor sleep, dehydration, hormones, bad luck, a rough week, or your body simply being difficult for no clear reason.

But your liver is involved in far more than most people realize.

It helps regulate fluid balance, digestion, blood clotting, energy storage, hormones, inflammation, waste processing, immune function, and how your body handles medications and toxins. So when the liver is struggling, the effects can show up in places that do not seem connected to the liver at all.

Brain fog, itching, swelling, fatigue, muscle loss, sleep changes, bruising, appetite changes, dizziness, shortness of breath, cramps, jaundice, and mood changes can all become part of the bigger picture.

You aren’t crazy if you start assuming that every new oddity or malady that arises is your liver acting up. Many are but not all, honestly it is impossible to tell on your own.
But it does mean symptoms are worth noticing, tracking, and following up with your healthcare team — especially when they are new, worsening, recurring, or hard to explain.

Click the images below to learn more & read about my experiences

Symptoms

Some are cues, some are cruel and chaotic, all are clues

Cirrhosis has a way of making everything feel connected and completely unrelated at the same time.

Not every symptom feels like a “liver symptom” at first.

Some changes feel obvious. Others are easy to explain away as aging, stress, poor sleep, dehydration, hormones, bad luck, a rough week, or your body simply being difficult for no clear reason.

But your liver is involved in far more than most people realize.

Can all be or become part of the bigger picture.

You aren’t crazy if you start assuming that every new oddity or malady that arises is your liver acting up. Many are but not all, honestly it is impossible to tell on your own.

But it does mean symptoms are worth noticing, tracking, and bringing up with your healthcare team — especially when they are new, worsening, recurring, or hard to explain.

all

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.

DRAFT ___ A Canary in the Crypt: Jaundice, MMA & Friendsgiving

The Strange Social Currency of a MELD Score

It is incredibly easy to get sucked into the strange social shorthand of liver disease—treating your blood work like a daily sports scoreboard or sorting yourself into brackets based on your peak bilirubin levels. But a collection of numbers typed into an online calculator will never be able to measure the sheer amount of grit it takes to move through the day with muscle wasting, navigate the haze of brain fog, or wake up every morning to look uncertainty dead in the eyes.

A lower number is an excellent sign of stability, but it isn't an automated pass that means you're suddenly symptom-free or "not sick anymore." And a higher number isn't a failure—it's just your body's way of raising a flag so your medical team knows exactly when to step in with reinforcement. Don't let a four-letter acronym flatten your humanity.

The Fibrotic Liver Labyrinth: My Surprise Cirrhosis

For years, your liver acts like a quiet, fiercely loyal worker, doing backflips behind the scenes to remodel around damage so you can keep living your life. It doesn't throw a fit until it has completely run out of options.

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.

Lush with Lactuose - The Lineup

The short answer is that lactulose acts as a biological safety net for your brain, but the way it performs this task happens entirely inside your digestive tract. When a patient asks, "Why do I have to take so much lactulose?" they are usually looking for a liver solution. However, lactulose is prescribed because a severely stressed liver can no longer process systemic metabolic waste.

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.