Suprise call from doctor....

I had just finished a very healthy dinner last night and was doing dishes when the phone rang - it was a little before 7. The caller was the liver doctor I saw yesterday. He said he was thinking about my case and had a few more questions for me.  I was shocked and stunned that a doctor of his caliber would call me at that time of day just to basically chat!  I mean he could have had a resident do that... We talked for about 15 minutes. He commented when I saw him that he is wondering if I truly have auto-immune hepatitis because it came on so fast with such high liver scores, it responded so quickly to the prednisone and has not flared up again. But yet, as he says, a specific test was done for auto-immune hepatitis and it was very, very positive. So the test says I have it but the symptoms don't agree. Now this guy not only has an MD, he also has a PhD, did his post medical school training at Yale and heads the Liver Research  Dept at KU Med Center so I think he knows what he is talking about. He wanted to know how much Tylenol and Ibuprofen I took back when the flare-ups happened.  Apparently the initial liver numbers are consistent with someone who takes a huge amount of Tylenol but I was rarely taking it back then. He still wants to continue a course of doing a liver biopsy in a year and then decided on what to do. I had labs done while I was there and he had the results back when he called - that is the great thing about having them done in a hospital as they come back so quickly.  My liver numbers were normal and my creatinine (kidney) was .9 which is great for someone with one kidney. He agrees that I am between a rock and a hard place in taking something for pain. He doesn't want me to take Tylenol and the kidney doctors don't want me to take ibuprofen....  He cautioned me about Tylenol being in some many OTC stuff and it isn't listed unless you really, really dig for the ingredients.  Anyway, I guess I'm his mystery patient for now and I don't think I could be in better hands.

KU Med center has started to successfully do "split-liver transplants" which won't mean a lot unless you are familiar with the transplant world. Larry closely followed that world in case he ever needed one again. There are currently about 17,000 people on the list throughout the US who are waiting on a liver transplant. Many of them will die before they get the transplant. The liver has an upper and lower lobe.  When a living donor donates a liver to someone, they lower lobe is taken from their liver. Livers regenerate but not back to their full size.  Basically what this new technology does is that one liver from a deceased person can be used to save 2 people - one lobe in each person. This is a very big breakthrough in the transplant world.... And that is your lesson on your liver for the day.