From the late 19th century all the way up to the 1980’s, coal miners really did use little yellow canaries as their early warning system for toxic gases. Due to their high metabolic rate and rapid breathing, the birds would show signs of distress before the miners noticed anything was wrong, giving the miners a chance to get out.
Fatty liver is an equally dark, but fitting parallel. Many people (myself included) are diagnosed with it due to their drinking. However, since it can be caused by either alcohol or weight, it’s pretty easy to talk yourself into it being just another “the doctor is always telling me to lose 10 pounds” deal, rather than a red flag. You don’t need to be obese or be drinking a bottle a day to get fatty liver. And it’s nothing like a death sentence, thousands of people don’t even know they have it. But it IS a signal that alcohol is damaging your body — the significance of which is undersold, hugely, in my opinion.
Because most liver problems come with no signals. This is one of the only warnings there is — so if you get it, you’re one of the lucky ones.
Many people seem to think there’s nausea or pain as early signs of internal organ damage due to drinking, but that’s just not the case. The liver itself has no nerves, so you can’t feel if it is swollen and scarring. You can feel the envelope around it straining once it is in serious trouble, but even most scans and tests are just a blurry snapshot of how it’s doing until it gets to that point. People experience liver failure, or start vomiting up blood out of the blue all the time. If you can handle that kind of stuff and need a scare, you can find many a message board online with a steady stream of terrible, terrible, stories about what just happened to loved ones. TL;DR: It is a fucking horrible way to go.
But the good news is: fatty liver is the absolute best wake-up call in the universe. When you get it, you most likely haven’t done that kind of long-term damage and your body responds like a sprinter out of the blocks if you take action! Give sobriety about 3 weeks and fatty liver starts to melt away — you’ll often even test negative by then, and energy levels are noticeably improved. What other major health problem can be turned around that quickly?
And then if a few weeks were that good…why stop?
Marginalia