In House of the Dragon, Olivia Cooke used fake pubic hair and scared off her co-star so much that he ran away:
“I said, “Can you make me the biggest, hairiest merkin? And I want the colour to be fiery red to match my hair.’
“And you know, I stuck it on and the reaction that my castmate had, Fabien, which I was a bit alarmed. I was like, ‘Surely you’ve seen like hair… pubes before?’
“Um, but he leapt to the other side of the room. And he was so shocked and disgusted. And he thought it was real. And I was like, ‘Oh no, what have I done? What have I done? What have I done?’
“I thought this was going to be funny but… I think he was really stricken with anxiety from that experience.”
This man has veins bulging out of his abdomen, fluid filling his belly, and a liver that is barely functioning.
He still hasn’t stopped drinking.
I see this in the ward more often than I’d like to admit.
A known alcoholic. Multiple previous admissions. History of decompensated liver cirrhosis. Ascites drained more than once. Put on diuretics. Counselled every single time. Family begged him to stop.
He was discharged two months ago with strict instructions. No alcohol. Follow up in two weeks. Continue lactulose. Continue spironolactone.
He came back yesterday. Abdomen distended. Prominent dilated veins across the abdominal wall. Caput medusae. The kind you show medical students because you rarely see it this clearly in a textbook.
His liver is so scarred that blood can’t flow through it normally anymore. Portal hypertension forces the blood to find alternate routes. Those veins you see on his abdomen are collaterals. The body’s desperate attempt to bypass a liver that has essentially shut down.
He also has tense ascites. Fluid filling the peritoneal cavity because his liver can no longer produce enough albumin to hold fluid inside the vessels. His serum albumin was 1.8. Normal is 3.5 to 5.5.
We drained 4 litres of fluid from his abdomen yesterday. He’ll need it drained again in weeks. Maybe sooner.
And when I asked him about alcohol his family answered before he could. “He never stopped. Not even for a week.”
This is what alcohol does when your liver has already given up. It’s not a slow decline anymore. Every drink is actively pushing him toward variceal bleeding or hepatic encephalopathy or spontaneous bacterial peritonitis or hepatorenal syndrome. Any one of these can kill him in hours.
The hardest part of medicine isn’t the diagnosis. It isn’t the treatment. It’s watching a patient walk back in with the same condition you treated last time because the one prescription they refused to follow was the only one that mattered.
Stop drinking.
That was the treatment. That was the whole treatment. And he couldn’t do it.
Addiction is a disease. But so is what it leads to. And by the time your abdomen looks like this the damage is not coming back
Girls…. I understood why they advise us to get married and have kids before 25. Because after that, our brain starts working, and the decision won’t seem so reasonable anymore.