Liver

So I stepped back up to the plate tonight and played a quick $2 SNG on bet365poker.com again and finished 2^nd. I should have won, but I was heads up with a guy and lost J10s to JQo – I was out kicked with a pair of J’s.

I am going to play a $10+$1 in a few minutes and thought I would use the time in between to blog a bit (need to keep the site current).

Tomorrow I have a liver biopsy at 2:00. “Wow” you say, “thanks for dropping that bomb on me. I thought this was a poker site”. Sorry, but you must get tired, poor reader, of hand histories and bad beat stories (“getting Planktoned”). I thought I would take the opportunity to share a bit of my life with you.

In the year 2002 I suffered a very serious illness, which I will not go into detail about here, but what is important to note is that I ended up taking very heavy doses of prednisone in an effort to fight the disease and as part of my surgical recovery. Prednisone is a steroid, not a Barry Bonds kind of steroid, but ones that can mess your body up just as bad. Five years after taking these drugs, I am still suffering from there effects, most notably in my liver.

Not my liver directly, but more indirectly the weight gain the drugs caused had a very negative effect on my liver. I was diagnosed with a fatty liver. This was detected through a series of blood tests, the details of which are incredibly boring and I will not include here.

After several doctor’s visits, the end result was that I needed to lose some weight. So over the past three months I lost about 20 pounds. My most recent tests showed that I am almost back to normal range for the enzymes and only slightly elevated triglycerides (boring, I know).

So if I am getting back to normal, why the biopsy? Well, they want to make sure there is no scaring of the liver.

What if there is scaring? I have no idea what they will do other than monitor my situation closely for the rest of my life, which they are going to do anyway.

The biopsy is a simple procedure, the stick a long needle in my side, take a sample of tissue with the needle from my liver and let me go home. I am under a sedative while they do it, and the process takes less than a second for the entire procedure. I am not supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds for two weeks, but with four kids, that is extremely unlikely.

Anyway – I should be fine and back to work on Wednesday.

For the record, I finished the tournament 42^nd out of 108. I then played a $2 SNG again and finished 7^th – lost with pocket K’s AGAIN! Sometimes I hate this game.