Asking My Liver for Forgiveness

Poetry. After a subtly disturbing, two- month illness of fatigue, depression, creepy psychological states, psychotic rage, and tickles of low-grade nausea, I woke up the morning after Thanksgiving, 2013, with an itchy chest and abdomen. My immediate, pre-conscious reaction: liver is hurt, dead in six months. It was impossible. There couldn't be anything wrong with my liver. Not after a lifetime shunning alcohol, drugs, and for the last few years, even sugar and white bread. My only transgression was the Paxil and Zyprexa I'd taken at low doses for thirteen years during which my psychiatrist never once ordered or even suggested blood tests to check liver function.

"Thank you for your book—for having written it and having lived it. It is so courageous. I do not have enough words to describe the impression it left on me. It is viscerally piercing and vulnerable. The book is beautiful, painful, harrowing, lacerating, ravishing, and unbelievable."—Patrick Lawler