News From Hawkhill Acres

Well, I hardly know where to begin. I guess it all started last winter when I developed some weird symptoms. I called it the “Marvin the Paranoid Android” syndrome, because it was a vague ache that seemed to come and go for no reason, at the bottom of my rib cage on the right side. Marvin’s pain was in his diodes all down his left side, but still. It seemed to taunt me, showing up for a few days until I’d decide to make an appointment with the doctor if it wasn’t gone the next day – and it was. Gone the next day, that is.

Things went on like that until my Spring checkup when I went in to see how much winter weight I’ve packed on this year and how my wonky thyroid is holding out with daily applications of Armour Thyroid pills. Doc G, a good man with the patience of a saint, suggested I have some blood tests, just to make sure the mysterious pain wasn’t anything we should be concerned with.

Of course, at the time, the pain had vanished entirely, so I forgot all about it and about the tests until I got a call from Mona, Doc G’s receptionist.

“Your tests were fine,” she said, which was no less than I had expected.

“Except that your TSH level is a little low, so maybe you should ramp back on the Armour a little.”

I told her I could cut it back from 120 mg to 90 mg and she said that’s what Doc G had written as a suggestion. I was about to thank her and hang up when she said, “Oh, there is one thing, one of your liver enzymes is a little high.”

With a pang of regret about that second glass of Shiraz I’d had with a friend a few days earlier, I nervously asked her what we needed to do about that.

“Oh,” she assured me, “It’s nothing serious, I’m sure. Probably just a fluke (egad, a liver fluke?) but it could possibly be an early sign of gallbladder disease. He’d like you to have an ultrasound just to be on the safe side.”

So I did. A week later, Mona called me again and gave me the good news: no sign of gallbladder disease whatsoever.

“Well, thank you,” I said, “That’s taken a weight off my mind.”

“Yup,” Mona went on, “Just fatty liver, but no gallbladder disease.”

Now, I’m sure Mona is a great receptionist, but when it comes to delivering news to patients over the phone, she’s on a par with – but nowhere near as funny as – the late Gracie Allen. I made an appointment to see Doc G and immediately swore off liquor, fatty foods and – for good measure – butter beans. (I hate them and they look like they have fat in them.)

Doc G took yet more blood, grilled me like Elliott Ness and managed to winkle out the fact that my grandmother had died from liver disease – cirrhosis of all things, which is odd because she was a teetotaler. I had forgotten that fact until I mentioned my liver problems to my oldest aunt, who then mentioned my grandmother’s liver disease which carried her off when she was only 5 years older than I am now.

I won’t bore you with a description of the tests and procedures that followed. Suffice it to say that I seem to have inherited my grandmother’s genes, although not her abstemiousness. Would that I had been a teetotaler and a vegan who spent her life living on raw brown rice and organic nettles. Instead, I swallowed (literally) the frequently touted belief that red wine is the perfect antidote to the fat in that Bugaboo Creek steak and garlic fries I noshed down a couple of times a week.

However, before I put David Crosby on my speed dial so I can ask him where he got his shiny new liver back in ‘95, I’m embarking on a crusade to save whatever is left of my own personal “whole-house” filtration system. I’m a researcher, for chrissakes. I’ve investigated everything from helminth therapy, to using banana skins to remove warts (it works!), to using soil bacteria to treat Depression.

In the last month, I’ve already radically changed the way I eat and drink. I’ve lost ten pounds and my blood pressure is slowly sinking downward. My shopping list looks like it was written by a Seventh Day Adventist who’s having a bunch of Hindu ascetics over for Lent.

My plan is to give it hell all summer and then have my enzyme levels checked in the fall. If they’re better, I’ll raise a glass of barley water and toast my researching ability. If they’re the same or worse, I’ll still probably be fine as long as I don’t eat or drink anything I really like. Apparently, livers are pretty good at working at diminished capacity as long as one doesn’t push them past their limits.

In closing, just a word to the wise. Before you hoist that next tankard of light beer, sip a mojito or chow down on that massive fried onion appetizer, you might want to make an appointment to get YOUR liver checked. I just read that Fatty Liver Disease is poised to be the next big epidemic. I’ve always been quick to find the Next Big Thing, but I really wish I wasn’t an early adopter on this one.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Increase in Liver Disease from Pollution (blisstree.com)
• Three Ways to Love Your Liver (fitsugar.com)
• Daily drinkers at greater risk of liver disease and bingers: research (telegraph.co.uk)

I used to be a one-L Lil. Now, I’m a two-L Lill. (I know there are two L’s in Lil and three in Lill, but I don’t count the first L. Call me quirky.) Anyhow, the way this came about is a long, drawn-out, torturous story that can be summed up in two words. Things happened. A couple of months ago, I was blissfully birding around the Net, working on links in my affiliate network, when I came across a form that wouldn’t let me enter my first name with fewer than four letters.

If I didn’t fill out the form, I couldn’t register my domain name, which was “lilhawkins.com”. Hawkins is the nom de plume I use for writing and business (not to be confused with the plume de ma tante, which is the pen I use to write the checks for the bills I have that makes going into business necessary, but I digress or should I say sortir du sujet?) At any rate, I was stumped, but only for a moment.

I could have used my given name, which is a lot longer than four letters, but I didn’t want to. I’ve been Lil since my nephews and nieces began to call me Aunt Lil and it’s been so long that their kids are calling me Aunt Lil now. So, on a whim, I just added an “L”, thinking that one letter wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference. But it did.

Because I had changed my name on the form, I thought I’d better change it on the domain name. So I did. Now my domain was lillhawkins.com, instead of lilhawkins.com. So how could I represent myself as “Lil” if my domain name said I was “Lill”? It was like something from a Sci-Fi movie or the pink stain in Dr. Suess’s The Cat In The Hat. I was morphing into someone else and I couldn’t stop it.

As Lil, I had started Lil’s List, a list of companies whose affiliate programs I had joined, because I liked their products and their way of doing business. But now it was Lill’s List and the name of the site had to change to reflect that. Unfortunately, I had already sent out the URL to about twenty people, so I had to contact them and explain and give them the new URL, which, if they just glanced at it, looked exactly like the old URL, which confused them and resulted in quite a few emails back and forth between us until we got it sorted out.

I guess I’ll get used to being Lill, sooner or later. Or maybe I should just say the L with it and change my name to Jessica or Brandy or something that doesn’t go so readily with “Aunt”. Even to me, Lil, with however many L’s sounds like someone who knits and wears glasses and is bookish… Oh yeah, that’s me. Or, rather, it was me with one L. I don’t know if it’s me with two L’s. Maybe it isn’t.

Maybe Lill never reads anything but directions for making exotic drinks. Maybe she prefers to buy hand-knitted sweaters, instead of knit them. And just maybe she doesn’t wear anything but Sophia Loren designer eyewear, instead of glasses from the Sale rack. If so, I hope Lill’s Net venture takes off pretty soon.

It was such a simple plan when it started. Research affiliate programs. Join some that fit my philosophy, pocketbook and lifestyle. Share them with people, like I’ve been doing since Al invented the Net. Get a little blog going to publicize the business. But then I wrote a couple of blog posts and realized that I’d much rather write than sell. Oh, I still worked on the business sites, researching, tweaking, testing. (I’d rather research, tweak and test than sell, too, but that’s another story.)

So I’ve done a lot more writing than selling and haven’t even run the ads I was going to run on the blog. I realized that, except for my friend’s jewelry and an Alibris search box, ads don’t belong on the blog. That’s when Lill’s List was born. Or rather Lil’s List, but what the L. It’s Lill’s List now. Heck it’s a shame I’m not Welsh. I could make it LLill’s LList.

The ironic point in all this, is that I’m not even sure I want to keep the domain name now. Blogs are much easier to herd than websites are and lillhawkins is a particularly bad choice for an URL, I’ve learned. Small “L” and capital “I” look very much alike and also resemble the number “1″. Even if I managed to get my site into the search engines, the laws of probability are against almost anyone keying it in right and actually getting to the thing.

I’m probably stuck with the domain until my year’s lease is up though, unless someone improbably named “Lill Hawkins” comes along and wants it. Or, alternatively, maybe someone named “Lil Hawkins” will come along, add an L to her name and take it off my hands. I think I’m getting delirious. Or is that dellirious? Oh, bother.