Cirrhosis of the liver: Diagnosis

hi guys welcome back to my channel this video is going to be about how i learned that i have cirrhosis of the liver and i'll try to make this quick um so that way the video is not too long so i was um losing a little bit of weight i think this was in july and i have been um trying to lose weight here and there and then in the beginning of august i felt like anything i ate would make me bloat and i hadn't i hadn't changed anything with my eating and then in late august i started swelling everywhere like my stomach my legs and my feet if i have pictures on my phone i'll insert them here and i figured oh it'll go away so it's not a big deal and then it started getting to where this swelling felt like it was like pushing under my ribs to where it was making it hard for me to breathe so i physically could not like get out of bed without there being so much uncomfortableness or um feeling like i had worked out to where it was like hard for me to to breathe i was so uncomfortable that i would cry at night and literally like i would try stretching nothing was helping and i felt like i just i couldn't take the i wouldn't i don't want to say pain it was more so um uncomfortableness but when it became too much for me to handle that's when i decided to go um to the urgent care i went i let them know that i had a hard time breathing and my body is swelling up okay so they took x-rays of my abdomen area they also um used the dye i don't know exactly what it's called but they use the dye and then the doctor came and he told me that i have cirrhosis of the liver my liver isn't functioning properly and that is the reason why i am swelling up with fluid at this point it was so much information and three years ago my mom passed from um many medical issues one of them was cirrhosis of the liver just hearing that made me scared it made me like pretty much think that i'm gonna die now because that's the same thing that happened to my mom which i know is not necessarily the case that was pretty much it the doctor prescribed water pills and these water pills are just to make you pretty much pee everything out that way you get all the extra fluids out of your body so i started taking um that which was helping a little bit um and i was still eating the same way that i usually do because i wasn't told any different i thought like the water pills would help and that's it and i i get better but my body kept swelling again it had gotten even worse to where i felt like no i have to go to the hospital so my husband took me to the hospital right when they saw me they admitted me in where they did all these tests blood work everything so they're at the hospital they did an mri and then they did a i believe they did a sonogram also or that may have been at the urgent care clinic and they said that i do have cirrhosis of the liver which i had already known they asked if i've ever done drugs or if i drink alcohol which yes i do or i did drink alcohol here and there but not i mean it's not like i depend on alcohol or anything like that i've never done drugs in my life which they didn't seem to believe me on either one of those questions or answers that i had given i'm assuming with cirrhosis of the liver the way that you get it is usually by sharing of needles or alcoholism i don't do either of those they asked me over and over i kept saying no i don't do drugs i've never i've never done drugs i don't drink on a daily basis the only thing that i can think of is when i was born i was premature so i had to have blood transfusions so i think at that time is when i um when i got hepatitis c i knew i had hepatitis c um when i got pregnant with my first son which was about 19 and a half years ago nobody else in my family has it but me but the doctor had said it's in your bloodstream but it's not affecting you so don't worry about it at that time there wasn't a cure for it either being that i was only 16 at the time i didn't care to do anything about it or get it checked afterwards because i always thought well i'm just a carrier i'm not um it's not affecting me and my liver so i'm assuming that is how i ended up getting cirrhosis of the liver i still have to go for uh testing so what i also had to have um the fluid drained from my abdomen and that is called paracen paracentesis where they actually insert a long needle it's like pretty long into where all the fluid is and then they drain all the excess fluid that is in the abdomen area and i do have pictures of that as well i will insert them here they ended up getting three liters of excess fluid and this was already after i had been taking the lasix which are the the water pills for a few days so all the swelling had already gone down in my legs and my feet so this was only what was left in my stomach the gi doctor said was from now on i'm i have to watch what i eat and my sodium needs to stay under 1800 milligrams a day and for fluids any fluid that i take in um it can't be more than one and a half liters a day so this is the diet that i should be following do i follow it exactly no and that's why i still have a little bit of swelling in my stomach but as far as like swelling in my legs and my feet that hasn't uh come back at all and then they also put me on the second prescription which was either the spirit lacto-low spirolactone or or furosemide whichever whichever one that i didn't have before now i take those two every day i do take a liver vitamin as well now the next step is just to stick with the diet and the fluid intake also i have to go to some liver institute here where i live so that way i can get started on the treatment for hepatitis c so that's how i was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver um if you guys have any questions please leave them down in the comment section below i'm learning a lot about this right now i don't know too too much about it just what i'm going through if you have any questions or you're going through the same thing go ahead and follow me here and i'll keep posting updates so thank you for watching and i'll see you guys in my next video

Channel: Angel Marie Zamiri

Views: 84,332

Keywords: Cirrhosis off the liver, Cirrhosis, My journey, How I was diagnosed, Low sodium diet

Id: TiF_hU4koHQ

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020