So once again I found myself staring at the bright sterile walls of the inside of the John Radcliffe Hospital, this time sitting in the blue area awaiting a Hepatology appointment. An immaculately dressed consultant whisked me into a room and we began to lay out my life history over the past 5 decades to try and solve a particularly knotty and annoying puzzle, how has a teetotal vegetarian who exercises and has a decent balanced diet ended up with a knackered liver?
After the shenanigans with my gall bladder last year I assumed that the slight scare I had after my operation - where the surgeon told me they were mildly concerned about how inflamed my liver was - was just as a result of pancreatitis and all the nonsense surrounding that, but it appears it's more than that - hence the life history.
The barrage of questions ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, and the thing that struck me was that it didn't seem to matter how far back a particular instance of youthful idiocy stretched, it could still have had a long-term affect hitherto unseen at the time. I have reasons for being teetotal that stretch back nearly 30 years but 30 years of abstention isn't apparently enough to clear you entirely (but in my case, social drinking and not drinking to excess was another thing to cross off the list of causes.
Then the questions around sexual health came up. One thing you have to be with a consultant is brutally honest, and when you start to lay all that business out as well, even for a lumpen ugly sod like me, you begin to realise that again even stuff you did in your youth could come back to haunt you decades later.
I began to wonder whether there was any point in leading a fairly healthy and vice-free life after all. Would I have ended up any better / worse off? Why has my liver chosen now to behave erratically.
The final answer comes from genes. You, my dear friends, are doomed it seems, from the moment you exit the womb and enter the world kicking and screaming. Within you, you carry the heritage of your ancestors both close and distant, and in the same way the general public are seemingly only just realising that viruses mutate and adapt to survive, so has your genetic code, spun folded and mutilated over generations but still containing all the potential issues that may stretch back to parents, grandparents and great grandparents - and even further back than that.
It's funny. So much of the press and airtime is given over to lecturing you on how to live your life. Eat healthier, exercise more, sleep better, practice mindfulness, cut down on your saturated fats, do a bit of yoga, adjust your surroundings. Yet sometimes even if you fall for all that, your genes will still strap on their 20 hole size 10 doc martens and give you a good solid kicking.
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