Reflections On a Life of Drinking

…“MY SECOND LIVER TRANSPLANT” –

May 5, 2023 – Jaundice turns your skin yellow. Also the whites of your eyes. Swollen ankles and midriff fluid – edema and ascites, I would learn to call them – are other outward signs of advanced alcoholic liver disease. For the most part, though, liver failure sneaks up on you. I had been feeling fine, or as fine as I ever did in those days, though I had, yes, stumbled and fallen a couple of times trying to empty the cats’ litter box and struggled with the recycling bins. Mostly I was tired, convinced I just needed to sleep off a routine gin-and-tonic binge.

Yeah, no. In fact I was sleepwalking off a cliff of advanced, life-threatening alcohol-fuelled disease. Advanced heavy drinking, what the therapeutic establishment likes to call substance-use disorder, can be like a plane crash in zero visibility: It’s one g all the way down, as pilots say. You only know you’re in a death spiral when the nose hits the ground.

My wife Molly, out of the country on family business, had begged me to call the ambulance – one of countless acts of life-saving love to come. My daughter had come over to make sure I made it to the emergency department. The Simpsons line was just added cosmic irony. I was forever quoting the series to my students, to the point of being a professorial running gag. Surely, I thought as we bumped along, there must be easier ways to be Homeric?