TheGeekSite

Medicinenet.com has an excellent article on NAFLD:

http://www.medicinenet.com/fatty_liver/article.htm

I often get nauseated when I need to eat, even when I do not feel hungry before the nausea sets in, and experience sudden onsets of extreme nausea, sweating, and trembling often occuring late at night and waking me from my sleep.  I thought these were due to low blood sugar and they always seem to get better after having a bite to eat and a glass of water.  Due to these symptoms and my weight, I’ve had frequent blood glucose tests performed and all have come back as normal.  My doctor has diagnosed this as “mild” pre-diabetic hypoglycemia, despite the frequent normal blood tests, and recommended I lose weight.  As it turns out, these are all common symptoms of NAFLD.

Upon suspecting NAFLD, my doctor put me on a very strict diet:

• NO alcohol
• EXTREMELY LOW / NO fat
• VERY LOW sugar
• LOW caffeine
• Medication and pain killers at the lowest dosage possible when absolutely necessary

But this was just an initial suspicions based on the results of the ultrasound.  My doctor also gave me a prescription for a double strength dose of Prilosec OTC and ordered more lab work to get a second look at my liver functions and check my kidney function as well as the normal cholesterol, blood glucose, triglycerides, etc.

After a week on Prilosec my symptoms had not improved and my lab work came back, once again, normal.

This was puzzling.  A second doctor reviewed the findings and stated, “This is not a text book example of anything.”

I had begun to experience new symptoms, sinus pressure, a sore throat, and feeling flush, although I was not running a fever.

A hypothesis was formed that perhaps the pain I was experiencing wasn’t being caused by the NAFLD.  Perhaps, just perhaps, I had a rare form of subdermal shingles (subdermal because I wasn’t displaying a rash or hives).  It matched all the symptoms (except for the fatty liver).  It could be that the pain was caused by the shingles and the ultrasound used to help diagnose the problem happened to detect the NAFLD before I experienced pain from the liver.  If that was the case, my doctor said the only thing was to wait it out.  I wasn’t satisfied with that answer and a CT scan was scheduled to get a better look at what was going on internally.

So at this point in the process it had been determined that I have NAFLD; I was on a very strict diet, which resulted in me essentially cutting out processed food and becoming a vegetarian; and two doctors were whiteboarding my symptoms like I was on an episode of House (oh yes, even Lupus was mentioned).

The CT scan was scheduled, I’ll post about it’s results in my next entry.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 12:38 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.