Microblog Memes

Ex alcoholic and “cirrhosis survivor” here. (I hate that latter term.)

I’m stunned that this situation went down how it did.

I had the full jaundice package when I finally went into the hospital and agreed to detox. I was told I would have to be booze-free for a minimum of six months to be considered for a transplant of any kind; both my liver and kidneys were in concerning shape.

They told me the timeframe for actually being considered was more like two years; there’s basically a board of trustees for each state, they review every case requesting an organ transplant and decide who gets what. (It’s literally a death panel, haha.)

No matter how good I was/am, I would still be at the very lowest priority. They’d have to have available livers as far as the eye can see for me to have a realistic chance. There is no actual chance I would ever get a donor liver, and I don’t want one.

I was dumb. I did it completely to myself. It’s not as simple as “you could’ve quit anytime you wanted,” trying to do that with alcohol is extraordinarily dangerous, BUT I did indeed do this to myself. It would be galactic levels of unethical and immoral for me to be trying to take a donor liver away from ANYONE.

I have since recovered way past the expectations of any medical personnel who worked on me during that time. July 1 will be two years alcohol-free for me.

My point in all of this is that I’m honestly having trouble believing this guy got this transplant at all, let alone so fast.

Organs don't keep... If they got the donor it probably meant there wasn't anybody else queued up.

Tylenol: that's a brand of paracetamol for non US people.

paracetamol packet

It looks like it's a sheet of 6-8 pills

https://www.nps.org.au/news/paracetamol-ibuprofen-combinations-for-acute-pain

according to the acetaminophen i've got at home, dangerous dosage is >4g per day. that means that if 4 packets was 20x that, each packet would be 20g, which, if they're normal 500mg pills, would be 40 pills per packet.

Various countries limit painkillers to small packet sizes (e.g. 20 pills here in Germany) and pharmacies only hand them out one at a time, so you can't overdose as easily/spontaneously, either like the person in the post did due to pain, or for suicidal purposes.
It's not perfect protection, as you can just go to multiple pharmacies to buy multiple packets, but yeah, you will have to actually go do that and will get told at the pharmacy that you shouldn't take more, if you're not aware.

I got a heart transplant about 18 hours after being added to the list.

Depends, who's your liver guy?

The liver damage is very believable but a liver transplant after 4 days is absurd.

I'm kind of pissed that such obvious and preventable idiocy leads to an almost immediate liver transplant.

Yes, that's just a lucky coincidence for him, but still...

People look up resources on them and see that the recommended max dose of ibuprofen is lower than paracetamol per day in weight of the active ingredient and stop reading.

They don't get to the part about how the effect per weight isn't the same. Or how damaging paracetamol can be for the liver if you take it regularly or go over the recommend limit. Heavy drinkers especially don't take into account the extra stress on their liver, which is a contributor to the 400-500 deaths it causes every year in the US alone.

Meanwhile ibuprofen makes you feel sick and want to vomit once you start to go over the recommended limit. And if you reach that stage, you basically just stay hydrated to keep your kidneys going and wait for it to pass. Since it usually takes another 2-3 times as much to for the severe effects to occur.

To quote Scrubs:

Dr. Cox: Did you just page me to ask me how much ibuprofen to give Mrs. Lenzner here?

Sunny: Well, I was worried it would exacerbate the patient's

Dr. Cox: It's ibuprofen! Here's what you do. When she wakes up, get her to open her mouth nice and wide, then get some of those ibuprofen pills in your hands and throw them at her. Whatever sticks in there, that's the correct dosage.

Yeah, how long until this idiot cooks this liver too?

Honestly, getting a liver transplant in a week is the most unbelievable part of this story.

The fact that the drug companies lied about the addictiveness of their product so doctors were handing them out like candy didn't help.

Americans don't call it paracematol, they call it acetaminophen or just tylenol. This is from the UK.

You haven't seen the ridiculous quantities that some alcoholics will consume