There’s a real stigma to liver disease. And I should know.. it nearly killed me but booze had nothing to do with it Danielle backs awareness drive
Jenny Morrison A life-saving liver transplant has tranformed Danielle Farrelly’s life and means that strangers will no longer think she has an alcohol problem.
The young woman, whose liver started shutting down when she was just five years old, has an autoimmune disorder that meant her body’s immune system attacked the organ.
Danielle, now 30, said her yellowtinged eyes and skin and diagnosis g of liver disease meantant others believed she was an alcoholic coholic or drug user.
Nine months after her transplant, she said: d: “Whenever you tell someone you’ve got a l iver problem, they always think that you’ve done something to cause the illness. No one should be judged for any illness they have e but, with liver disease ase in par ticular, there’s ere’s definitely a stigma attached. tached.
“Whenever I’ve beenn in hospital, there have been patientsents on my ward with liver problems caused by alcohol or drugs but there are so many causes of liver disease.
“Too few people understand that it can affect anyone of any age.
“I was just a little girl when I started to show signs my liver wasn’t working but I was seriously ill before
my condicondi tiontionn was diagnosed.d I was toldld I wouldld need the transplant within five years but in the end I went for more than nine years without needing a new liver.
“For those years, my life was in complete limbo. I’d been studying costume design at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow when I first fell ill and had to give it up. I was too ill to hold down a job and I even lost lots of friends as I was too ill to go out mostmo of the time.”
Danielle, of Barlanark, Glasgow, who lives with her partner Craig Lee, 30, a paramedic, said growing up she was always covered in bruises and suffered itchy skin. When she was 18, she went to herh GP after developing a bulging lumplu at her belly button, which she was intially told was a hernia.
ButB after blood tests, Danielle received a call telling her to go straight to Monklands Hospital, in Airdrie. She said: “I was told my platelets were so low they couldn’t believe I was still standing. They thought I had leukaemia and started to run lots of tests including a lumbar puncture.” Tests revealed no sign of cancer but showed she had a hugely enlarged spleen and a shrunken liver. She said: “It was my huge spleen that had caused my belly button to be pushed out.”
She was then diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis. She had surgery to remove her spleen and was told her liver was so sick she would eventually need a transplant. She had the life-saving operation this January.
Three people die every day in Scotland from the disease.
Danielle said: “In November, I started to go downhill. My skin started to turn yellow, my eyes looked yellow – the more well-known signs of liver problems.
“I was so ill, I could hardly move. I was admitted to a specialist unit at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and on January 5 a nurse came to wake me and said they had a liver for me.
“All I know about my donor is that she was a girl around the same age as me. She saved my life and I will always be so grateful to her and her family.”
Danielle, who lives with autoimmune hepatitis, hopes medication will stop her new liver suffering the damage caused to the liver she lost and is looking forward to the future.
She is backing a British Liver Trust campaign, Sound the Alarm, which hopes to ensure faster diagnosis for patients with liver problems.
Professor Steven Ryder, medical adviser to the British Liver Trust, says: “Currently, three- quarters of people with liver disease are diagnosed very late in a hospital setting. At this stage, transplantation is their only hope.
“About a quarter of those patients die within 60 days. This has to stop. The tragedy is that, in most cases, these deaths could have been avoided with earlier diagnosis.”
Too peo few und ple tha ers aff tit tan d ect can of any any one age