The rest of the story. Chapter 1

Just after we found out that we were expecting Mary, Earl started getting sick. At first we joked that since I wasn't really having morning sickness, he was. Then it started not being funny. It was happening way too often. We ended up in the emergency room and were eventually introduced to Dr. Boschert, a gastroenterologist. After many tests it was determined that Earl has hepititis C, a chronic liver disease. We were told that a liver transplant was most likely in our future. There is a treatment option called pegylated interferon. We tried the treatment after Mary was born, starting in December 2001. The treatment didn't work for Earl's genotype of the disease. For the last seven years we have been in kind of a waiting mode. Waiting for Earl's liver to be bad enough to need the transplant. All the while, Earl gets very tired, very quickly. He is more suseptable to infections. Because his liver doesn't work properly he gets a little absent minded. He hasn't been well enough to hold a job. He might feel great one day, then the next day, he can't get out of bed. So that is how we have been living for almost seven years.

In April 2008, Earl had his annual CT scan of his abdomen. Everything looked pretty much status quo. Then in May, Earl was in a car accident. He broke his leg but it wasn't detected on a regular X-ray, so we made a couple of trips to the ER trying to get help with the pain. On one of those trips, they took blood for a test for alpha fetal protein (AFP). It was slightly elevated although we didn't know this at this point.

In August, we met with Dr. Boschert for a regular visit. He noted that the AFP was elevated and told us that this test is a tumor marker. He wanted to re-do the CT scan and the blood test. We repeated these and found out that Earl indeed has tumors in his liver. We thought that this might be a good thing because it would get him a transplant sooner.