PSC for Beginners

In a parallel universe to ours, I wake one morning and take a couple of swigs from the tequila bottle on my bedside table.  Stumbling to the kitchen, I make myself my first few cups of coffee of the day. A little whiskey gives the coffee a bit of a kick and I light up a cigarette and contemplate how lucky I was to grow up without exposure to farm animals.

In the universe from which I blog now, I am teetotal having previously been a very light and occasional drinker. I have never smoked and never been a coffee drinker. As a child I dabbled in the occasional visit to a farm. I am also on the liver transplant waiting list after a condition called Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC) has properly made a mess of my liver. 

Fun fact: parallel universe me is less likely to need a new liver due to PSC (NB. it is possible parallel universe me would need a liver transplant from his heavy drinking but not from PSC). Yep, that's right, alcohol consumption has no bearing on your probability of getting PSC. And more curiously, drinking coffee and smoking both reduce your chances of developing PSC. Oh and apparently PSC patients are more likely to have had exposure to farm animals as children (how does anyone think to research such things?!).

Many people focus on the negatives of PSC like symptoms of fatigue and intense itching, the fact there's no cure and that our understanding of the disease is so limited, the probability of needing a life saving transplant etc etc. But people forget the joy that jaundice can bring to kids who think their dad looks like a minion and the hilarious toilet based consequences of a litre or two of pre-colonoscopy bowel prep (most PSC patients get regular colonoscopies often due to related irritable bowel disease).

I was added to the liver transplant waiting list on 9th March 2022 and I intend to use this blog to chronicle some of the journey ahead. I expect there will be a bit of a mix of silliness and emotional honesty (because it turns out keeping everything bottled up and displaying the same level of emotion as a toast rack isn't healthy). There may be some reflecting on my Christian faith during what will probably be a challenging journey. We will also dip into the pool of information about PSC as relevant to the story but, for those interested, the PSC Support website is a much better source than here for either more detailed or less wildly inaccurate information about PSC.

Oh and by way of competition, feel free to guess how many blog posts I'll write before I get a new liver. The winner will receive a signed copy of a post-op scar photo!