Today's Forecast: Partly Cloudy with Heavy Brain Fog

I was struggling today with some very bad brain fog. Sitting here at work trying to focus has been a huge challenge for me. People are coming up to speak to me and I am looking at them speaking but honestly, I don’t hear anything they are saying.

Trying to act 'normal' while in a fog

Going into a meeting in a quiet room with a handful of people was the biggest obstacle yet. Acting or should I say “pretending” to be normal was very hard to do today. I am finding that most of life now is around how well I can act.  Pretending everything is A-OK.

There are days that I feel like this and I know with a little rest and lots of water or tea to flush my system I will be ok. I can usually see an onset of hepatic encephalopathy (H.E.).  I start feeling dazed out and motions begin to slow down. It is like a slow-mo production move on frame to frame moving along. I get a groggy feeling and my limbs get very heavy.

There has only been one time where I ignored this feeling and I got so bad that I could not talk and was so out of it. My kids were forced to call a dear friend who, at time, knew exactly what to do. I was given a double dose of lactulose (medication prescribed to help flush toxins out of our systems). I was completely panicked during all this. My kids from the look in my eyes knew this was serious. I was in bad shape.

Learning from past experiences

Once I got things back under control and was able to regain my sanity, I made a point to myself that I would never again skip a dose of medication. I was under the false pretense that if I was cured of hep C I would no longer need this medication. I was sternly corrected by my liver doctor on the facts about liver disease.  Yes, hep C is gone, however, my stage of liver disease is not better. I take these medications for my liver, not hep C.

So, when days like today start to happen, it is a warning signal to me that 1): I forgot to take my medication, 2): I am not eating a proper, clean liver-friendly diet, 3: not getting ample hours of rest at night and lastly, I am not drinking enough water.

With all this said, we do have some control over all our body’s actions. Not completely, but we do have some. It is very important to maintain a regular schedule of taking medications, eating right, and taking care of our bodies with good resting periods and sleep.