Once a girl was treated with us. She arrived by ambulance with serious alcohol poisoning. She was only 26 years old. She was unconscious. She was urgently intubated in the emergency room and transported to the intensive care unit. When they began to do various tests, it turned out that she had stage IV cirrhosis of the liver. A few days later, the girl turned yellow. This often happens when the patient has liver problems. The skin became completely completely yellow, and the whites of the eyes also turned yellow. The social worker tracked down this girl’s family and it turned out that this girl had a serious problem with alcohol, and she regularly drank an average of a bottle of vodka every day. The patient was in a very critical condition. She began to gradually refuse all important vital organs. Every day of this girl’s life was a miracle. After 15 days on a ventilator, she underwent a tracheotomy.
If a patient has an endotracheal tube in the throat for more than 2 weeks, then scars remain on the vocal cords from constant friction of the tube and tissue. This complication is called vocal cord stenosis. In this case, the patient may remain for life with a hoarse and muffled voice, or even lose it. Therefore, if the patient is on a ventilator for more than 10 days, and removal from the ventilator is not possible in the near future, then doctors do a tracheotomy to save his voice.
The yellow girl urgently needed a liver transplant. Without a transplant, there was little hope that she would survive. But alcoholics and drug addicts are not put on the waiting list for transplantation. To be eligible to stand in line for a new liver, the girl had to go without drinking for at least 90 days. So this young girl was slowly dying.
Once in her youth, she underwent a nose job and, judging by the photographs that her relatives hung in the ward, she was very attractive. During her stay in the hospital, and possibly from some kind of medication, her nose stopped holding its shape. It felt like the cartilage of the nose had simply dissolved. In place of the nose was just a flat piece of skin. Looking at the photographs that her relatives hung in the ward, it was hard to believe that the beautiful smiling girl in the photograph and the skeleton covered with yellow skin without a nose and with a hole in the neck are one and the same person.
Contrary to all the doctors’ predictions, this girl survived. I remember how after a few weeks in intensive care, she was transferred to a regular ward. At that time, she still had a tracheotomy, she constantly needed to suck out the mucus and fluid that accumulated in her lungs. Her skin and the whites of her eyes were still yellow. After a long treatment, she was transferred to a special clinic for further treatment. I don’t know what happened to her afterwards. I would like to believe that after a stay in the hospital, she then still refused alcohol and got on the waiting list for a liver transplant.