Good News

I was hoping to get news today regarding the liver biopsy and I was not disappointed. I received a call around noon from a nurse in the Interventional Radiology department at Northwestern Memorial and she gave me the good news that the biopsy did not show any problems in my liver. I will be having a Hepatic Angiogram next Wednesday to inject dye into the liver to get a good view of the blood vessels and the location of my hemangioma. Hopefully this will provide some answers on why the portal veins coming into my liver have more pressure than expected.

There are still lots of questions about my liver but I am very happy that the biopsy removed a lot of possible causes from the list. I was most worried that my liver had been damaged by a autoimmune disease and that this was the cause of the portal hypertension. I was concerned when I had read of this possible cause as I do have a different autoimmune issue going on in my system which has been causing severe hives for the past 21 months. I am very thankful that this was not the case with my liver as it would have indicated a long term issue with my liver.

I apologize to anyone reading this blog that it has become so "health" focused. When I started the blog it really wasn't my plan but it does reflect my life the past few weeks. As some of the issues have come up I have tried to research them on the internet. Often I find medical papers on different procedures but what I am often interested in is anecdotal stories about people who have already gone through the procedure and any information that they can share including how they tolerated the procedure. I am not always able to find these types of stories but I am thankful when I do as it makes the procedure more real. At some point I decided that I would like to use my blog to share my medical experiences so that it may be a resource for someone else going through these procedures in the future. It is this reason that I have at times included very specific medical terms so that future google searches may hit this. Hopefully anyone that reads these entries in the future will be encouraged as I have been by reading the stories of others.

My hope is that the liver story will have a happy ending sometime in the not too distant future and I can again write about more fun things. (This is not a promise that it will be any more interesting however.) :)