On 8/11/15 4:20 PM, SeaNymph wrote:

Sounds like you had a really bad case. The symptoms of mono are many
and varied. Often times the spleen gets enlarged, which if very
dangerous. High, sustained fever is another. Many people get bad cases
of jaundice. As far as I know, there's no real treatment other than to
address what symptoms you present with. I had the swollen spleen, the
jaundice and ran 105 temp for 10 days. It was pretty bad. 2 months
later, I was much better, but was told to tread lightly because I would
be more likely than others to come down with it again.

I'm glad you survived because I know how tough it can be.

I was curious, so I looked it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_liver_failure

If I couldn't get warm in a mummy sleeping bag in a warm room, and I was
very weak, and my eyes were yellow, acute liver failure sounds like a
suitable diagnosis, although I wasn't told it.

It says ACL is the rapid onset of liver dysfunction in a person without
known prior liver disease. It says "hyperacute" occurs within 7 days.
Mine was more like 7 minutes.

When the local doctor saw my yellow eyes, his best bet might have been
acetaminophen overdose. The second might have been reaction to
medication. The third, too much to drink. The usual infectious agents
are Hepatitis A and B, but A comes in epidemics from contaminated food
and water.

That leaves B, transmitted by sharing needles. About 1% if Americans are
infected. Few are treated because only 1% have the potential to cause
ALF. There was a 1 in 10,000 chance that a person would have acute liver
trouble from hepatitis B. The only reason to assume I had hepatitis B
was an assumption that I was a junkie. I'd lived in the community 15
years, and nothing in my behavior suggested that. It had to be because I
was a Vietnam veteran. (A few years later, Johnny Carson made the
serious announcement that he thought it was time for "us" to forgive the
Vietnam veterans.)

The VA doctor was more polite in the way he told me to go to hell, but
he, too, treated me like Lazarus. He told me there was no treatment for
mono, and I mustn't drink any beer for 6 months because my liver was
shot. Did he assume I was a boozer because I was a Vietnam veteran?

Somewhere I've read that in 1% of cases, mono "explodes" when it hits
the liver, and the victims are normally males. That's where I got the 2%
figure for males. Now I've found an abstract of research done from 1998
to 2012.

http://link.springer.com/article/10....620-014-3029-2

They said ALF is uncommon, and the fatality rate is high. They studied
records of 1887 ALF cases between 1998 and 2012. All were 18-44 years
old and 75% male. Of these, 4 (0.21%) were caused by the EB virus. All
were treated with an antiviral agent. Two died and a third needed a
liver transplant.

I think ALF may be much more common. It takes lab work to diagnose it.
If the criteria are met, wouldn't the doctor be likely to say it was
previously undiagnosed chronic failure? Similarly, if a doctor
determined that it was acute, would he even look for a link to something
seemingly as unlikely as the EB virus? Many report that the cause is
unknown, or perhaps he could blame a medication that might cause ALF.

Five years earlier, my father had suffered a severe illness that started
the same way: suddenly, he couldn't get warm. I didn't connect the two
cases because they said mine was mono and his was Epstein-Barr. We had
large glycogen stores in common. He might eat a light breakfast, then
not slow down to eat until 11 PM.

I figure the virus affects most livers like a torpedo hitting a
battleship. You might not even notice, or you might suffer inconvenience
until the damage can be repaired. I figure a liver full of glycogen is
like an aircraft carrier full of aviation fuel.

As the rector of a parish with 700 households, he got the best doctors.
They put him in an iron lung. His breathing soon recovered, but his legs
were weak and painful for the rest of his life. He'd become a priest on
account of his legs. After college, his ambition was to break in with
the Red Sox. His running and jumping were exceptional. Baseball
mattered more than religion to the bishop. He saw him play and recruited
him.

I was lucky to be a Vietnam veteran. The doctors directed me to the
gutter, and I had a pleasant recovery. For a fan of Sad Sack, sleeping
around the clock for a few weeks was ideal. Think of all the idiotic TV
and conversation I avoided! The day I felt strong enough to step
outside, I walked two miles to the library, caught up on periodicals,
and walked back. I wasn't up to par, but I was doing fine.

I experienced no usual symptoms of mono. Maybe my immune system overcame
the virus fast, if not fast enough for my liver. Vitamins A and D are
vital to the immune system. An enlightened diet may have been my
father's disadvantage.

My mother had quit serving liver when I was a teen because medical
fashion said Vitamin A was dangerous. You were supposed to get it from
beta carotene, but medical fashion said to serve vegetables raw or
blanched because cooking destroyed vitamins. Unfortunately, the human
gut can't get much nutrition from vegetables that aren't cooked soft.
You were supposed to get beta carotene in vitamin pills, but medical
fashion said not to eat fat at breakfast. Without fat to trigger the
secretion of bile, beta carotene doesn't become vitamin A.

My father used to love reading shirtless in the sun, but a few years
before his illness, his doctor ordered him to avoid the sun because that
was the latest medical fashion. Medical fashion said to get vitamin D
from vitamin pills, but the usual supplement in pills was more useful to
rats than humans. The supplement usually found in milk was better, but
medical fashion said not to drink much.

When I enlisted, I was glad to get liver again, and I found I loved
vegetables cooked soft. I didn't avoid the sun. (In Vietnam, I got so
much sun that I looked like a gingerbread boy with bleached, curly hair,
not the dark, straight hair I'd had at home. I guess that's how I caught
the eye of the princess.)

Unlike my enlightened parents, I ate dumb, old-fashioned food and
followed a dumb, old-fashioned lifestyle. I figured we dumb people must
have been doing something right because there were lot more of us alive
than there were smart people.

Sixteen years after his time in the iron lung, his doctor ordered him to
avoid dairy products because that was the latest medical fashion. A year
later, he had terminal throat cancer. Fed up with doctors, he declined
treatment because it was known to be useless except of course to bring
in lots of insurance money.

My siblings smugly said it was his own fault for smoking a pipe, which
he'd quit on doctor's orders 20 years earlier. That was medical fashion.
The medical industry ignored the Surgeon General's 1964 report on
smoking. It proved cigarettes killed but noted that pipe smokers lived 3
years longer than men who had never smoked.

His cancer was rare in America but common in China, where so many people
had it and so many smoked that it could be determined that there was no
statistical correlation. That kind of cancer is caused by the EB virus.
In ordering my father to avoid any sun or milk, the doctors crippled his
immune system. The common virus that had once put him in an iron lung,
came back to kill him.