I just got home from the hospital.  It looks like I'm not going to die from liver cancer or general organ failure.  They don't know exactly what I have, but they know what I don't have.  I might still have to go in for a liver biopsy, but that's outpatient.  Unpleasant, but not involving another hospital stay.

I'm no longer yellow.  My pee is pretty much pee colored now.  Here, check out my liver:

No, those black spots aren't tumors.  This is from the CT scan "with contrast."  I first had to drink 24 ounces of radioactive iodine.  My nurse gave me a giant glass of the shit.  "I'll come back in ten minutes or so to see how you're doing with that."

I had already picked it up and done the college student, pour it down your throat trick.  As a kid, I was disqualified from a second place finish in the one man beer bong event in the A&M beer-olympics for blowing the foam on the holder.  That's okay, I shared the gold medal in the two man beer bong.

He wasn't even out of the room yet "Done!"

"Wow, really?"

Then they injected me with a bunch of it during the CT scan.  It was nasty.  I could feel it entering each of my organ systems in turn.  First my circulatory system, then my respiratory system, then my digestive system, and finally my excratory system filled up with it.  It took about 4 minutes.

Right now, they think I might have hemochromatosis.  It's a genetic disorder where your body has way too much iron in the blood.  The hemotologist told me, at first, that it was unlikely because I'd know about it by now.

"What if I've donated blood every few months my entire adult life and just stopped a couple years ago when I moved here because it was inconvenient."

"Well... Yeah, that could do it.  Let's get a genetic profile done."

So that meant giving up more blood.  Hemochromatosis would also be suggested by my recovery in the hospital with no real treatment other than an obscene amount of IV fluids.  They've literally taken about 100 vials of blood from me in the last three days, which would make a normal person slightly anemic.  Me, it just levelled out my iron a bit. 

So my altruism over the last couple decades has kept my potentially fatal illness at bay.  My lack of altruism since I moved here might have done permanent damage to my liver.

Time to start donating blood again.  If I do have this thing, I'll actually have to donate more than I'm legally allowed to.  That's a lot of free juice and cookies.

I had so many toxins in my blood that I thought I had a raging sinus infection and conjunctivitis in both eyes.  It was just the poisons fucking with my mucus membranes.  It also felt like I had the wold's worst sunburn over every square inch of my body.

It's good to be home.  Now I can concentrate on my divorce and home repo.  Joy.