OW.

Pretty much sums up my day. Somehow or other the 40 mg of prednisone gave me insomnia all night. I managed to nod off for a few hours between 8 and 10:30 a.m. this morning. It was miserable. I wanted to sleep and rest my eyes. But I just laid there in the dark for hours completely unable to lose consciousness. Attempts to make up my sleep deficit in the daytime and afternoon were no good either. I could lie down with my eyes closed and doze, but that was all.

Still very little appetite or interest in eating. Still the feeling of fullness. Now accompanied by a markedly enlarged spleen and some associated pain. It feels like a stomachache, only not in my stomach, and it doesn't go away. It's worse when I move.

I was trying to relax and de-stress myself with yoga and even that was hard. My poor sore abdomen was not having some of the stretching and twisting.

I am feeling a little manic again. But the mood boost is welcome, even if it's artificial. Artificiality is probably all I can hope for right now, especially with people calling me and introducing themselves as my transplant coordinator, and telling me my MELD (Model for End-Stage Liver Disease) score, which measures the probability of my survival for the next three months. (UM.)

(Mine is 19, if you're curious, on a scale of 6 to 40. The higher the score, the closer you are to liver failure. The average score for a patient undergoing a transplant is 20.)