After his first visit to hospital his specialist advised him that if he continued to drink any alcohol he would probably not survive more than six months because his liver was only working at about 25% of its normal capacity.
He was advised to stop drinking completely and Paul's reaction was to say, "If I'm going to die I might as well carry on!". This didn't make me feel any better at all - I wasn't ready to let him go, but they doctors had given him a death sentence and all we could do was make the most of the time we had left, and try to prepare for the inevitable.
Paul was very stoical about everything - as he rightly pointed out, he wasn't afraid of dying and having "seen it all and done it all" there was nothing he still felt he wanted to do in life. He'd had a good one and he didin't believe in any kind of afterlife, so for him it was, and still is, a case of "When I'm gone, I'm gone, and I won't be around to worry about it."
My reaction, naturally, was different. I just couldn't get my head around the fact that he was going to leave me so soon. I had finally found the one man who loved me for who I was and who I could genuinely say I loved back just as much in spite of all the problems, and now he was going to leave me on my own.
I did a lot of crying, mostly in private, but then I decided that all I could really do was carry on and hope for the best.
It was around this time that Paul proposed to me and knowing that our time together may be short, I accepted and we were married in the local register office. Paul made a tremendous effort and really scrubbed up well for the wedding. We had a wonderful day surrounded by our friends and my family because Paul's parents were long dead and he had no brothers or sisters.
A couple of months after the wedding Paul became extremely tired and refused to get out of bed for anything. He was grumpy and irritable and full of bad language - not at all like himself, and, imagining that this was the beginning of the end, I started to get really worried about him so I sent for the doctor.
He did a few checks on him and when it was quite obvious that Paul didn't even know what day it was, the doctor said he was probably suffering from encefalopathy, a brain disease that is caused by a build up of toxins in the blood. It happens when the liver becomes unable to do its normal job of filtering out the impurities. Paul was back drinking at this stage - not so much as before, but enough to cause further damage.
He was rushed into hospital for the second time and put on a drip to feed high doses of Vitamin K into his system amongst other things including up to 4 litres of blood. When I went to visit him in the evening he was still out of it and I really did think that this was the beginning of the end. I went home fully expecting to receive a phone call to tell me he was on his way.
The following morning, having heard nothing from the hospital I rang and they told me he was out of danger. I gathered together some bits and pieces of clothing for him and took them to hospital for him. He was very tired but at least he knew me again and over the next three or four days his memory slowly started to come back. He could remember nothing about the events prior to his hospital admission and was very surprised to have woken up there. Apparently nobody had bothered to talk to him about his admission or his condition.
In a nutshell, encefalopathy is a highly dangerous and life threatening condition. It causes dementia-like symptions and all common sense and memory go out of the window. If not caught and treated in time it will kill you. In the longer term, if it doesn't take your life it does erode your short term memory and in Paul's case he found he had difficulty remembering people's names and appointments.
But in spite of this, Paul, as had so often happened in his past life, had now cheated death FOUR times in the space of about three months!
See you next time!
